“Strategic.”
“Accurate.” I let a beat pass. “The strategy was a bonus.”
He glanced at me. The corner of his mouth hooked higher. “You enjoyed that.”
I said nothing. The silence was answer enough.
His shoulders dropped another fraction. Not gone—the tension lived in him the way certain kinds of weather lived in certain places, constant and unremarkable—but loosened. The line of his jaw softened. He rolled the lollipop from one cheek to the other, the wrapper crinkling faintly.
One of my men was boxing the switchblades. He handled each one with the respect you give a weapon that’s seen use—careful, two-handed, blade closed. The largest one went in last, nestled in a t-shirt I recognized from the guest suite. Jai’s cutoff Army shirt. The one he’d been wearing at three a.m. when Grace woke screaming.
The manuscript box was nearly full. Pages stacked spine-out, margins visible, handwriting in the margins in ink so blue it was almost black. I could see fragments from where I stood: dialoguecrossed out and rewritten, arrows pointing to new paragraphs, notes in the margin that said things like “TOO MUCH” and “FIX THIS” and once, in capital letters that took up half the margin, “WHY.”
The apartment was being dismantled with the efficiency of people who did this for a living. Drawers emptied. Closet cleared. The desk stripped down to bare wood, the laptop already in Jai’s bag. One man was folding clothes with the precision of someone who’d been taught by someone strict. Another was cataloguing electronics—the charger, the external drive, the headphones tangled in a knot that defied physics.
Jai watched it all with the calm of a man who’d packed his life into duffels more times than he could count. There was no sentiment in it. Just the practical assessment of assets being relocated.
He picked up a paperback from the floor—one his mother had missed—and turned it over in his hands. The cover was bright, embossed, a man’s torso taking up most of the real estate. He looked at it for a long moment, then set it in the box with the others, spine out.
I held the quiet knowledge that in twenty minutes, Jai’s belongings would be on the elevator. His books on my shelves. His knives in my drawers. His scent in the walls of my penthouse, layered over cedar and scotch until the two became something new.
For tonight, that was enough.
Jai caught me watching him. He didn’t look away. His eyes held mine the way they had that first night in my office—challenge and curiosity in equal measure, the look of a man who’d decided, against his better judgment, to see how this played out.
The bakery smell warmed the air. Cherry blossom cut through it, sharp and sweet. My men worked in the kind of quietthat came from good training and the understanding that some silences were worth keeping.
I breathed. Again. Deeper.
Jai’s mouth curved. Just a little.
I turned back to the window. The city spread below us, gray and wet and indifferent. In twenty minutes, we’d be gone. The apartment would be empty. The bakery would keep baking. The water stain would stay in the corner, waiting for whoever moved in next.
None of that mattered.
What mattered was the man standing six feet away, rolling a lollipop between his teeth, watching his life get packed into boxes with the calm certainty of someone who’d already decided where he was going.
I’d known, from the moment I’d seen him with Grace in his arms, that I would burn this city to the ground before I let anything take him from me. Today, I hadn’t needed to burn anything. Just pack a few boxes. Just say the word mate in a room full of people who didn’t understand what it meant.
Just watch him breathe.
For tonight, that was enough.
Chapter Ten
~ Jai ~
Grace started babbling at the ceiling at exactly five forty-seven in the morning. Not crying. Babbling. Full conversational cadence, no consonants, just a steady stream of vowels aimed at the recessed lighting like it had personally offended her.
I was on my feet before my eyes opened all the way, spine straight, hand already reaching for the bassinet—the kind of reflex that came from seven years of being woken by things that weren’t supposed to be happening.
The bedroom was still dark except for the amber slice of sunrise hitting the east-facing glass, turning the dark walnut floors the color of old scotch. The guest suite smelled like cedar and the faint cherry-blossom residue that clung to my skin no matter how many times I showered.
I stood there in yesterday’s socks, heart hammering for no reason, and listened to Grace conduct what sounded like a TED Talk on the subject of recessed lighting. Her fists punched the air. Her feet kicked under the swaddle. Not a cry in sight. Just pure, unfiltered commentary.
“Morning to you too, bean,” I muttered, and scrubbed a hand over my face. My stubble had graduated to something that could legally be called a beard in three states. I needed a razor. I needed coffee. I needed to stop launching out of bed like the building was on fire every time the baby made a noise that wasn’t screaming.
But my body had apparently decided that Grace’s vocal range was now my problem, regardless of volume or emotional content. I filed that under “new and annoying information about myself” and reached for her.
