“It had knife-play tension and a morally compromised billionaire. I had no choice.”
I roll my eyes, but he’s not wrong.
The book came out of nowhere, really. Or maybe it didn’t. Maybe it came out of everything I’ve been trying not to say for months. A man with too much power. A woman with too much to lose. Cities, danger, wanting, shame, obsession. I keep changing details, changing names, changing outcomes, but if I’m honest, there’s a pulse in it that came from somewhere real.
I do not think about that too long.
Jake takes a drink of coffee and says, lighter now, “You know he came looking for you.”
I go still. Not because I didn’t know.
Because I did. I just wish I didn’t.
“I know,” I say.
Jake nods slowly. “At the studio first. Then again a couple weeks later. Didn’t come in yelling or anything. Just asked questions in that terrifying calm way rich men do when they know everyone will tell them something eventually.”
I stare at the table.
My fingers tighten around the paper cup in my hands.
I had heard about it after the fact. From one of the sound guys, then from Jake, then from the landlord in my old building who suddenly remembered a “very intense gentleman” asking after me.
I didn’t care. Or at least that’s what I told myself.
I had already decided by then: I wasn’t going back. Not to him. Not to that office. Not to that world full of bodyguards and blood ties and men who could order entire lives around with one phone call.
Not even if he came looking. Especially not then.
“I’m not going back,” I say quietly.
Jake lifts a brow. “I didn’t ask.”
“I know.”
“You just looked like you needed to say it.”
Maybe I did. I rest both hands on my belly now, feeling the pressure, the weight, the very real consequence of every choice I made back then.
“I’m not a part of that world,” I say.
Jake doesn’t answer right away. When he does, it’s careful. “You kind of are.”
I look up sharply.
He raises both hands. “Not by choice. I get it. But Zee, city gossip has been feral for months. Warehouses hit, people switching sides, some finance war in a suit, whatever rich criminals call civil unrest. Even I’ve heard his name more than once.”
My stomach tightens. I have heard it too.
Little things. Fragments. A shooting in Queens. A fire in a storage yard in Jersey. Security stepped up in neighborhoods that don’t usually need it. And always that same undertone in the stories, like something bigger is happening under the surface and regular people are just catching sparks from it.
I’ve tried not to listen. Tried not to wonder.
But of course, I have wondered.
And sometimes, in the worst moments, I’ve wondered if it’s because of me.
If Aleksei’s life got worse because I left. If my disappearance solved one problem and created another. Or if that’s just vanity, and men like them would be setting cities on fire whether I existed or not.
