By the second day, the routine falls apart.
She doesn’t eat. I see her open the fridge, stare into it, and close it again like food is a foreign concept. She flinches at small sounds. She jumps at the buzz of her phone and then leaves it where it lies, face-down on the counter, as if it’s something venomous.
And the part that crawls under my skin—the part I don’t have language for—is the way she stops masking.
Not for Ella.
When the kid comes home, Violet tries. I can see her attempt to be human again, to smile, and to ask about school. But it’s brittle. Forced. Like she’s acting in a scene she hasn’t rehearsed. She laughs too late. Her eyes don’t move with her mouth. When Ella talks, Violet’s gaze keeps sliding to the window, the door, and the phone, as if any of them might open and swallow her whole.
Maverick gives me the same report, delivered the same way he delivers everything—clean, flat, and operational.
No one has been in or out. No visitors. No calls. No patterns suggesting she sent product to the penthouse, no trace of her leaving to meet anyone. Just withdrawal. Deterioration. A woman going hollow.
“Maybe she’s just guilty,” Maverick says, as if guilt is a tidy thing. A checkbox.
But guilt doesn’t look like this.
Guilt doesn’t make someone stare at their phone like it’s going to bite them.
I tell myself I’m watching her because she’s a liability. Because the drug is involved, and so is my territory. A girl is dead, and I’m still trying to work out whether that blood sits on my hands or on someone else’s.
That’s the story I keep repeating.
It would be easier if it were true.
Cami doesn’t call her. Not once. Not in a way I can see. Not in a way that matters. Cami Devereaux is too busy being outraged on behalf of her parties, too busy smoothing the feathers of people who are already looking for someone to blame. The silence from her side is loud, and it makes Violet’s isolation feel crueler than it should.
By the end of the second day, I can’t stand it.
I’m angry about the party that happened inside my borders without my approval. I’m angry about a designer drug I still can’t replicate no matter how many brilliant minds I throw at it. I’m furious at the thought that Violet made something powerful enough to kill and then let it leave her hands like it didn’t matter.
And beneath all of that is something worse—something I refuse to name—because it doesn’t fit in the structure I’ve built to survive.
I don’t like watching her collapse.
I don’t like that I can feel it in my chest as if the crack is happening inside me. I shouldn’t care like this. I don’t let myself care like this. Caring leads to weakness, and weakness gets people killed.
So I make a decision I shouldn’t.
The drive out of Manhattan stretches and contracts all at once, traffic crawling toward the river before finally loosening its grip. The city gives way to bridges, dark water, and the quiet hum of leaving one world for another. By the time I cross into New Jersey, the tension in my chest has settled into something sharper. More dangerous.
This isn’t impulse. It’s inevitability.
When I pull onto her street, it’s quieter than it should be, residential and dim, and nothing like the constant thrum of Manhattan. I park without thinking about cameras, without thinking about alternate exits or who might be watching me do this.
That alone should concern me.
I cut the engine and sit there for a moment, hands still on the wheel, reminding myself that I’m here because I have to be. Because she’s a variable I can’t leave unattended. Because watching her fall apart from a distance is no longer acceptable.
Not because I want to see her.
I get out of the car before I can talk myself out of it.
The sound of my knock echoes through the hall. A pause follows, heavy enough that I almost turn around out of habit, and almost retreat into the version of myself that never asks for anything.
Slow footsteps approach.
The door opens a crack, chain still latched. One eye appears in the gap, wary and bright with sleeplessness.
