Novels by alexcynthia235

Luna woke to sunlight instead of moonlight, and to the unfamiliar, dangerous comfort of waking somewhere that smelled entirely like him.The sheets beside her had long since gone cool — Ethan was already gone, the space where he'd lain the night before nothing but a faint dent in the pillow and the ghost-warmth of cedar and salt still clinging to the linens — but her own body carried the memory of the night in ways sleep hadn't erased. The unhurried weight of his hands. The rough, reverent murmur of her name against her skin somewhere past midnight, stripped of every cold warning he'd delivered in the living room hours earlier. The slow, devastating patience of a man who'd spent the entire evening insisting this meant nothing while touching her like it meant everything.She'd woken twice in the night to find him watching her in the dark, his expression unguarded in a way she suspected he'd never allow in daylight, and both times he'd drawn her back against his chest without a word, as

She had said yes.Luna remembered almost nothing of the actual word leaving her mouth — only the roar of relief that had swept through six hundred guests when it did, the priest's booming pronouncement, the eruption of applause that had rattled the stained glass in its two-hundred-year-old frames, Ethan's hand tightening around hers as he'd bent to kiss her a second time, chaste and photographable, nothing like the terrace. She remembered her father weeping openly in the front pew, unashamed for the first time since his accident. She remembered Aria's hand pressed to her own mouth, sobbing happily into Freya's shoulder. She remembered, distantly, the anonymous text still glowing somewhere in the folds of her gown like a coal she hadn't found the nerve to look at again.She did not remember, until the black car pulled beneath the private entrance of Vance Tower's residential floors well past midnight, exactly how she'd gotten from the altar to here — stripped of six hundred witnesses,

Kai had said nothing, in the end. He'd simply stepped aside the width of a single pace, enough to let Ethan's familiar footsteps close the distance behind her, and by the time Ethan's hand found the small of her back — warm, questioning, a silent *are you all right* pressed into her spine through nothing but touch — Kai had already melted back into whatever shadow had produced him, as though the entire encounter had been a trick of the corridor's dim gold light.Luna had said nothing about The Ghost that night. Not to Ethan, not even to Freya once she'd finally found her way back to the ballroom's noise and light. She'd filed the conversation away instead, turning Silas's words over and over in the sleepless hours before dawn — *someone with access to information only a handful of people should have* — until the phrase had worn smooth and strange in her mind, a stone rubbed featureless by too much handling.That had been three weeks ago. Tonight, she stood in a private dressing suite

The kiss had ended the way all good performances ended — not abruptly, but with a slow, deliberate unwinding, Ethan's mouth lifting from hers by fractions of an inch while the cameras beyond the glass kept firing, capturing every last frame of the aftermath: her flushed cheeks, her parted lips, the way her hand had fisted in the lapel of his jacket without her permission. He'd murmured something about *perfect, exactly what we needed* against her temple, low enough that only she could hear it, and Luna had spent the following twenty minutes trying to convince her own pulse that the ringing in her ears was adrenaline and not something far more dangerous.She excused herself to find the ladies' room sometime after ten, needing five minutes alone with cold water and a mirror to remember who she was supposed to be tonight — Luna Sterling, poised and unbothered, not some woman still feeling the ghost-press of a man's mouth against hers an hour after the fact. The powder room, when she foun

The dress had arrived that afternoon in a box lined with tissue paper so pale it was nearly translucent, no note attached, no explanation — just a single line from Ethan's assistant confirming a car would collect her at seven. Luna had stood in her closet holding the thing up to the light, a deep emerald silk that pooled like water over her arm, and thought, with a bitterness that surprised her by how tired it sounded even in her own head, *of course he dresses me too.*She wore it anyway. There was no version of tonight where she walked into the Vance Media & Film gala looking anything less than flawless, and she refused to give either Ethan or the wolves circling this city's social pages the satisfaction of catching her underdressed for her own public unveiling.Freya zipped her into it at six-forty, hands steady despite the worry that had lived behind her eyes since the men left Luna's office three days ago. "You look like you could burn the whole room down," Freya said, adjusting

Luna didn't sign it. Not that morning.She'd taken the contract instead — snatched it off the mahogany desk before Ethan Vance could press the pen back into her hand, and walked out of his office with her spine so rigid it ached, past the silver-haired assistant, past the security detail stationed like statues along the corridor, into the elevator where she finally let her knees remember they were shaking. By the time she reached the lobby, she'd stopped trembling. By the time she reached her car, she'd already decided: she would read every clause of this thing before she let it anywhere near her signature. Ethan Vance did not strike her as a man who left anything to chance, which meant the contract in her bag was not a lifeline. It was a leash. She intended to know exactly how long the chain was before she let him fasten it around her throat.She spent the rest of the day locked in her office with the blinds drawn, three cups of black coffee gone cold at her elbow, and Freya perched