“West,” his voice is a blade of cold steel. “Just confirming our meeting with Senator Davis. Wednesday. My office. You’ll be presenting the Q4 projections for the renewables division. I expect you to be flawless.”
“I will be,” I say, my voice a mirror of his own cold confidence.
“Good. And the ball,” he continues, the topic shift is seamless. “I trust your… girlfriend… will be presentable. The boardmembers will be there. Their wives will be watching. This is not the time for any… collegiate theatrics.”
The veiled threat is clear. Kinsley is on probation. She needs to perform.
“She will be perfect,” I say, a slow, cold smile spreading across my face as I picture the emerald dress. “She will be the only thing anyone talks about.”
“See that she is,” Asher says, and the line goes dead.
He thinks this is a test of her suitability. He has no idea that it’s a coronation.
When I pick Kinsley up at five, the change in her is palpable. The quiet confidence from this morning has been shattered, replaced by a fragile, brittle stillness.
“Rough day?” I ask, already knowing the answer. I engineered it to be.
She doesn’t open her eyes. “You could say that.”
I let the silence sit for a few moments before I prompt her. “Talk to me, Kinsley. What happened?”
Her voice is flat, clinical, the voice of a professional detaching from a trauma I helped orchestrate. “We lost a patient. A seventeen-year-old girl. Fulminant hepatic failure.”
“Liver failure,” I translate. “What was the cause?”
“Acetaminophen overdose,” she says, her voice cracking. “Intentional. It was a suicide attempt.”
I reach across the console, my hand covering hers. Her skin is ice-cold. “She’s lucky to have had you,” I say quietly. “Someone who fought for her. Someone who understood.”
Her head snaps toward me, her eyes wide with the startled, vulnerable shock. She heard the double meaning.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” she whispers, trying to pull her hand away.
I don’t let her. My grip tightens, an anchoring pressure. “Don’t I, Kinsley?” I say, my voice a low, intimate murmur. “I know youfight. Every single day. I know you build walls of perfection and control to keep the chaos at bay, and I know what it must have felt like to watch someone else lose that fight.”
A single tear escapes, a perfect, glistening crack in her facade.
“It’s not your fault,” I continue, my thumb stroking the back of her hand. “You can’t save everyone. Some storms are too strong.”
“Then what’s the point?” she asks, her voice choked with a raw, desperate grief that is not just for the girl, but for herself. “What’s the point of fighting so hard if the storm can just… win?”
“The point,” I say, my gaze intense, unwavering, “is to have a lighthouse. An anchor. Something to hold onto when the waves get too high.” I turn my attention back to the road but my hand remains on hers, a silent, possessive promise.I am your lighthouse. I am your anchor, and I am the one who summoned the storm.
I don’t take her back to the penthouse. The thought of her sitting there, stewing in the aftermath of her clinicals is unacceptable. She needs a different kind of stimulation.
I pull up in front of a quiet, unassuming building in a historic part of the city. A small, brass plaque by the door reads: “The Athenaeum. By Appointment Only.”
“What is this?” she asks, her brow furrowed in confusion.
“A date,” I say, coming around to open her door.
Inside, the air smells of old leather and aging paper. It’s a private library and bookstore, specializing in rare scientific and medical texts. The owner, a man whose gambling debts my uncle once discreetly settled, greets me with a deferential nod and then disappears, leaving us alone in the hallowed silence.
I watch as Kinsley walks through the towering aisles. The weariness falls away from her, replaced by a pure, unadulterated awe. Her fingers, long and elegant, trail over the spines of booksthat are centuries old. She is in her element. This is her other church.
She pulls out a 19th-century anatomical atlas, the hand-drawn plates rendered with an artist’s care and a scientist’s precision. She turns the fragile pages with a reverence that makes my chest tighten.
“This is incredible,” she whispers, her eyes shining. “I’ve only ever seen digital copies of these.”
