THEO
The marquee glowed like a palace of lies when I stepped back inside, barely stitched together, a man made of splinters and duct tape. When Sinclair left me in that locker room—on my knees, wrecked—he didn’t just walk away. He took my fucking heart with him.
It had been bruised before. Cracked. Weathered. But this time, he left a gaping hollow, a raw, bleeding pit where something living used to be. And now I was expected to return to this glittering circus like nothing had happened.
The tables sparkled with crystal and silver. The flowers were perfect, arranged with surgical precision like they’d been designed to mock me.
The world hadn’t ended. Not for anyone else.
I slid into my seat a shell of a man, surrounded by a sea of polished masks and expensive perfume. Silk dresses shimmered. Dark suits gleamed. People laughed like they weren’t rotting inside.
“How did it go?” Rosalie leaned in, trying to tame the wreck of my hair that Sin had destroyed with his hands and mouth. Her fingers were gentle—comforting—but wrong.
Unable to speak, I just shook my head and clenched my fists, willing the tears back. I had gone after him to tell the truth. About me. About Rosalie. About how we’d spent the last few weeks planning our escape from this life. And the hold they had over us.
But logic disintegrated the moment I was in his orbit. That magnetism—that cursed, electric pull—obliterated every thought. I didn’t talk. I couldn’t even if I’d tried. Every thought evaporated from my mind. Instead, I touched. I tasted. I begged.
It had been so long. And I was weak.
“I fucked up,” I rasped, turning away so no one would see me falling apart. She looked at me, soft with worry.
“Oh, Theo…” she murmured, low and steady while the room buzzed around us, full of chatter and clinking glass.
“I meant to talk to him. I did. But…” My voice broke.
“You needed to touch him more than you needed to speak,” she finished for me.
I nodded, swallowing down the emotion lodged in my throat and sniffed. God, I was pathetic.
She cupped my face, wiping away the tears I couldn’t stop. To an outsider, it would’ve looked romantic—two perfect heirs sharing a private moment.
But we were just two friends holding each other together with spit and string and lies.
“It’ll work out,” she whispered. “It has to.”
I wanted to believe her. I did. But I felt like a cat who had burned through eight and a half lives, each more reckless than the last.
We didn’t notice the shift. The pause in conversation. The staff passed out fresh flutes of champagne. The way my father rose to his feet, silver spoon tapping his glass with a smugness that could crush bone.
I didn’t hear the bomb until it dropped.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” my father’s voice echoed across the room like a war drum. “Thank you for joining us this evening. I’m proud to announce the engagement of my son, Theodore Astor, and the lovely Rosalie Vanderbilt.”
My heart stopped.
Time. Fucking. Froze.
The blood drained from my face. My lungs locked up tight. My reality fractured like glass under pressure. People clapped. Cheered. Applauded the death of me. Cameras flashed as Rosealie and I looked at each other with mirrored expressions of horror.
My watery gaze landed on Sin across the room. He looked like he’d been stabbed in the gut. Skin bone white, he staggered as my father’s words sliced straight through him.
Rosalie gasped, “Oh shit.” Her hand clutching my arm, nails digging in like she was anchoring me to this imploding world.
But my focus was locked on Sin. It was like a car crash happening in slow motion. You knew what was going to happen, but you couldn’t look away. The bucket of iced champagne he was holding slipped through his hands. It hit the ground with a savage crack, champagne exploding across the floor like it was blood. Shattered glass glittered like diamonds in the wreckage.
The sound reverberated through the silence that encompassed the marquee with deafening clarity.
Dozens of heads turned toward him. The broken boy with tears burning his beautiful skin. The man who owned my heart.
