Restraint is too fucking new.Too fucking hard.It feels like balancing a glass on my palm while standing on one foot and refusing to move until she does.
A gull carves the fog overhead, and the sound snaps a thread I’ve been holding all morning.The present shifts and the memory pulls me under.
When the doorman buzzed,I knew better than to say no.A man like Arthur Bradley doesn’t show up without a reason.The elevator doors slide open, and he strolls into my penthouse as if he owns the air.I’m already pacing, nails bad against my palms, nerves worn raw.
He steps inside, suit pressed, folder under his arm, calm in a way that makes my skin prickle.
“You look like hell,” Arthur says before the door shuts.
“Nice to see you too,” I mutter.My voice is a rasp from hours of tensing.
He doesn’t bother with small talk.He crosses to the dining table and lays the folder down.When he flips it open, everything in there feels ...inevitable.
Photos fan across the polished wood: handshakes in shadowed corridors, cars with opaque glass, Dorian Thorne smiling while someone else takes the picture.Cleo stands at his side in one frame, her profile blurred, but it’s unmistakable.
Arthur never has to look up to know I’m watching.He knows I am.
“If Cleo Wilder—” He clears his throat, correcting himself with a small, contemptuous smile.“I mean, Cleo Jones is with him.She isn’t his loving fiancée.She’s leverage.And leverage doesn’t get to walk away ...ever.”
The words fall like a gavel—final and inexorable.My mouth goes dry.The old calculation begins low in my ribs, the automatic math that taught me how to hide, how to bargain, how to survive beneath a light that looks like care but cuts like a blade.
“You’re calling her Jones?”I ask because maybe he has the wrong Cleo.Fuck, I hope he does.“That’s not her name.”
“She hasn’t used Wilder in a couple of years.Took her mother’s last name when she disappeared.Clara Vanderpool made the introductions.She placed her daughter in Thorne’s orbit.”He taps a document tucked under the photos.“And from that point on, everything about her life starts running through him.Her addresses, her accounts, her public appearances.He decides the terms.”
He flips more pages: bank transfers routed through shells, offshore accounts, companies that exist on paper and nowhere else.A neat column of numbers blinks up at me like a verdict.
“I don’t deal in guesses,” he says.His finger traces a row of transfers the way some people trace a line on a map.“If you want her back, this is the man you’re chasing.Organized crime networks.Trafficking channels.Politicians on retainer.Do you think he chose her because he fell in love?She’s part of something.She’s being moved when it suits him—and she’s with him willingly.”
My jaw tightens.“You don’t know that.You don’t know her.”
Cleo doesn’t care about status or money.She actually lived modestly, even when she had a trust fund.She kept the same Corolla for at least two years.There has to be something else.
“I know what his money buys.”Arthur’s tone doesn’t rise.It doesn’t need to.It falls into the room like a verdict.“And right now, he’s bought access.He’s not planning on marrying for love.He’s securing positions.He invests in assets.If Cleo is with him, she’s an asset with strings attached.As I mentioned, people with strings rarely walk out of rooms like that.”
The folder snaps shut, almost like he’s closing a coffin.
My chest knots.For a second, I almost tell him to go fuck himself—that Cleo isn’t property, isn’t a deal he can tally up in columns.That she’s more than a pawn in someone else’s game.But the words jam in my throat because what if he’s right?What if I’ve been chasing the wrong ghost—believing this was about a broken heart, about her running from her past?What if it was never about choice at all?
If Arthur’s right, this isn’t something I can fix by being better, by groveling, by trying to become the man she wants me to be.This isn’t a scandal that fades with time or a wound that eventually scars over.This is something bigger.Something that devours people whole.Men who don’t ask permission are already circling, and once they move in, there’s no space left for hope.
“Do you think she’s in danger?”I have to ask, because I need the answer to be wrong.
He nods.“Even if she walked in there willingly, this is something she won’t be able to walk away from—ever.”
Suddenly, ridiculous smallness eats whatever I thought I was chasing.My stomach drops, and I’m pacing before I can stop the motion.My fists tighten, the bandages tugging at the skin of my knuckles.“Then what am I supposed to do to save her?”
Arthur’s eyes cut to me, silver and unblinking.He doesn’t breathe like someone waiting for drama—he breathes like someone catalogued it.“Don’t go playing hero.Not like this.You’re running on obsession, Eddie, and obsession gets people killed.”
Cleo from the gala flickers into my mind—posed, hollow, looking right through me.No longer alive the way she once was.My chest snags, a slow tearing that makes me want to scream into the glass and shame the whole city for letting it happen.
Arthur lowers himself into a chair and folds his hands.He’s calm, surgical.“Dorian Thorne doesn’t make mistakes.He doesn’t forgive them.If you rush in, you don’t just pull him out—you light a match under everyone close to you.Barret, the band, your mother—they become targets.I don’t want that coming back at you.I don’t want that blood on your hands.”
My head snaps up.“Leave Barret out of this.”
Arthur arches a brow.“You think Thorne will?He’ll go after anything you care about.People like him don’t just crush enemies.They crush the people who make their enemies human.”
Silence clamps down between us.My breath stutters, uneven.
