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“But with me.”

“With you, apparently, constantly, and I don’t have a good explanation for it.” Honest. The wine and the hour and her having worn straight through the discipline he usually kept about what was said out loud. “I’m still deciding whether that’s a problem.”

“Is the deciding going well?”

“No. Not even slightly.”

She stood before dessert arrived, coat off the back of the chair in one motion, a woman enforcing her own decision that the evening had reached its natural end before either of them said a true thing dangerous enough to change it.

“Try not to schedule me like a meeting next time.”

She left. No lingering, no goodbye performance — gone, heels on marble fading down the corridor toward the street. He watched the door she’d walked through for longer than the empty doorway warranted, half expecting it to open again, knowing it wouldn’t.

His dragon was furious about the direction she was walking in. Every instinct he owned screamed at him to go after her, catch the door before it closed, say the one sentence that would make all of this instantly and permanently clear.

He stayed in the chair. His hands, flat on the table, didn’t move either, knuckles white enough against the linen that he made himself notice it and stop.

He let her walk because the alternative was cornering her on a sidewalk with a confession she hadn’t asked for and wasn’t ready to receive, and he was, on rare occasion, disciplined enough to know the difference between what he wanted right now and what the moment could hold without breaking a thing that mattered more than his own impatience.

He needed a better plan than the one currently running, which amounted, at present, to no plan at all — and centuries of practice at getting his own way had done nothing to prepare him for a woman who argued back this well.

Victor was waiting in the executive suite when he got back, already talking before Norden had fully cleared the door.

“Tarek’s network moved. Watching became planning sometime in the last six hours.” No preamble. “Her movements are being tracked in real time. Right now. Active surveillance, updating by the minute, cross-referenced against her calendar.”

Norden crossed the room in four strides, coat still on, and braced both hands against the desk edge, weight forward, the posture of someone who needed a solid surface under his palms while he processed what he was hearing.

“Her calendar.”

“They know her schedule better than a stranger should. Studio hours. Installation hours.” Victor’s voice flattened, the closest he came to visibly rattled. “Tonight. They knew you were at that restaurant before you’d finished ordering the first course.”

Norden went very still. “Say that again, slowly.”

“They had the restaurant location before you did, Norden. That’s not surveillance anymore. That’s someone with a direct line into your calendar or hers, and I intend to find out which by morning.” Victor didn’t flinch from the look aimed at him, had worked this job long enough to know when a temper wasn’t pointed at him personally at all. “I’ve already pulled the guest list for tonight’s reservation. I’m cross-checking it against everyone with access to your schedule. It’s a short list. It’s about to get shorter.”

The window he’d been counting on — the careful version, telling her himself, on his own schedule, the whole truth laid out instead of dealt to her in pieces across a dinner table — slammed shut somewhere between the second course and the moment he’d let her walk out that door without saying the thing that mattered most.

He was out of time to be careful.

He was going to have to be fast instead, and he intended to be right the first time, because Tarek had already demonstrated how little patience he had for second chances once a gap this size opened in front of him.

TEN

ROMILY

Jessa caught her at the door with a to-go container that had absolutely not been asked for and would absolutely not be refused.

“Leftover risotto. Don’t argue, I made too much and Marco’s on a cleanse again, which means I’m one bad day away from throwing the whole fridge out the window.”

“I’m not on a cleanse. I’m being intentional about carbs.” Marco didn’t look up from the invoice he was squinting at, glasses pushed up into his hair where they did nothing useful at all. “There’s a difference, and I resent the implication.”

“There isn’t, and you brought a protein bar to my birthday dinner, so forgive me for not taking the intentional-carbs thing seriously.”

Romily took the container, mostly to end the argument before it escalated into the full production it was clearly building toward. “Thank you. Truly. Lock up behind me?”

“Always.” Jessa caught her arm before she made it to the door, studying her with the particular squint she reserved for structural cracks and emotional ones. “You’ve had a face on you for three days. The good kind. The kind where you keep almost-smiling at your phone and then pretending you weren’t.”

“I don’t have a face.”