“You look like trouble,” he murmured.
I raised an eyebrow. “You look like regret.”
He smiled, dark and crooked. “Then why are you still staring?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t need to.
Instead, I took his hand and led him into the shadows.
Down a side hall lined with jack-o-lanterns and flickering lanterns, I backed into the wall, heart pounding. He followed, stopping just a breath away.
I reached up, fingers slipping into his hair as I pulled him down to me.
Our kiss wasn’t gentle—it was fire and memory and hunger. His hands on my waist, mine tangled in his jacket. The world blurred around us, every thought stripped away until there was only heat, and breath, and want.
“No one knows who we are tonight,” he whispered against my throat.
“Then let’s be no one,” I said back.
We danced later, under antique chandeliers and clouds of fog, laughing like ghosts. He spun me, pulled me close, kissed me again in a corner no one else cared to notice.
For a few stolen hours, we didn’t belong to Royal Oaks. We weren’t caught in old stories and new pain. We were just Leo and Jade, wrapped in shadows and secrets.
And after the party, we didn’t go home.
We boarded his boat in Nantucket—just the two of us, aweekend away from it all. Aunt Susan thought I was with Shani. Shani covered like a champ.
We made breakfast barefoot in the galley. Read books curled up under fleece blankets. I wore one of his sweatshirts and nothing else.
At night, we made love slow, the ocean rocking gently beneath us.
He kissed my scars like they didn’t scare him.
Held me like I wasn’t a ticking bomb.
I wanted to stay in that bubble forever. But I knew we couldn’t.
Still, that weekend was ours.
Our secret.
Our stolen fairytale.
Our masquerade.
Chapter Sixteen
LEO
I knewsomething was off the moment I walked in.
Dad was already home—which never happened before six—and Mom was seated at the head of the dining table, lips pressed so tightly together they looked surgically sealed. The lights were too bright. The air too still.
A folder sat between them. Thick. Labeled. My gut clenched before I even reached the chair across from them.
Dad gestured. “Sit.”
I didn’t.
