Novels by ROSY

Adrian’s PovI woke before the household did, out of habit more than intention, and reached across the sofa cushions before I'd fully opened my eyes. Empty. Her side of the room, or whatever the sofa counted as a side, held nothing but a folded blanket and the pillow she'd once declared war on, still sitting exactly where she'd left it the night before.No note. No message. No explanation waiting on my phone. I checked twice, in case I'd missed something in the half light, some small courtesy she might have left behind out of habit rather than intention. There was nothing at all.I wasn't surprised. Emily had made it clear from the first morning that she didn't intend to account for her whereabouts to anyone, least of all to me. What bothered me was how cleanly she'd managed it, slipping out of a house full of staff, cameras, and a security team paid handsomely to notice exactly this kind of thing, without a single person seeing which door she'd used.I checked the time. She'd already

Emily’s PovI drove toward the address the caller had given me, his final words still sitting at the back of my mind. The place they never wanted you to find.I didn't let myself get sentimental about it. Sentiment was a luxury I'd stopped affording myself somewhere around year three, when hoping had cost more than it gave back. The only question that mattered was why now, after fifteen years of silence, someone connected to my mother had finally decided to reach for me. People didn't stay silent that long out of loyalty. They stayed silent because something had kept them quiet, and I intended to find out what.The address led to a narrow brick building in Silvercrest's oldest district, wedged between a shuttered print shop and a bakery that smelled like it had been baking the same bread since before I was born. It was the kind of street that had survived every renovation the city had tried to throw at it out of pure stubbornness. I circled the block once before I parked. Old habits,

Emily's Pov I woke before the sky did, the way I always had in the years when waking up on time meant the difference between eating and not, a habit fifteen years in a house full of other people's money had never managed to soften out of me.Adrian was still asleep on the sofa, one arm thrown over his eyes, the pillow he'd declared war on the night before finally back beneath his head like it had surrendered sometime after midnight, a truce nobody had bothered to announce. I let myself look at him for exactly one second longer than I needed to, studying the line of his jaw in the gray half-light, the stillness that never quite left him even asleep. Handsome, in the specific way men who'd never had to earn anything sometimes were. Still not my problem.I dressed quietly in the dark and left before the house woke up around me, before the staff could ask questions I wasn't ready to answer and before Adrian could ask the one question I definitely wasn't ready for.My phone buzzed before

Emily's Pov Adrian's words still hung in the entrance hall when the first sound finally broke the silence, a teacup rattling against its saucer in a maid's trembling hands. The sound seemed impossibly loud against a silence that thick, and nobody moved to steady her, as if moving at all might make whatever had just happened more real than it already was."Mrs... Kingsley?" An elderly butler said it like he was testing whether the words would hold his weight, turning them over slowly, the same way I'd have turned over a foreign phrase I didn't quite trust myself to pronounce.They hadn't finished settling before a set of doors at the far end of the hall opened, and a man walked in whose face I recognized instantly from every article I'd read preparing for tonight, every photograph I'd studied until I knew the exact angle of his jaw. Edward Kingsley crossed the marble floor with the same unhurried authority Adrian had, except colder, older, and considerably less pleased to see me stand

Emily's Pov Silence held the car for exactly three seconds after I said the words.My family.Then Adrian's phone lit up on the seat between us. One notification. Then another. Then the screen filled faster than either of us could read it, and up front, a second phone started buzzing too, then a third, until the whole car hummed with it like something alive.I pulled mine from my clutch out of habit more than curiosity.Breaking news banners had already replaced whatever three networks had been airing an hour ago. A shaky cathedral video played on a loop under a red ticker, my hand connecting with Claire's cheek frozen mid-swing as the thumbnail. Someone had captioned it before I'd even sat down in this car.THE DEAD HEIRESS RETURNS.KINGSLEY WEDDING ENDS IN CHAOS.WHO IS EMILY GRANT?Comments stacked under the videos faster than the counter could keep up, strangers arguing over a name they'd known for ninety seconds as they'd always had an opinion on it. My face, blurry and lit gold

Emily's Pov One second, my feet were on the cathedral floor. The next, Adrian Kingsley had thrown me over his shoulder as if I belonged there.My breath left me in a short gasp. The floor dropped away. The cathedral ceiling swung into view upside down, gold leaf and painted saints staring back at an angle I never expected. Blood rushed to my head. Below me, five hundred voices erupted at once, a wall of sound crashing over the aisle like a tide finally allowed to break.I didn't fight him. Fighting would have looked like fear, and fear was the one thing I refused to give in to in this room.Instead I let my hands settle against his back, steadying myself against the sensation of being carried out of a wedding I had just detonated.Claire's scream cut through everything else, raw and furious. "Adrian! Adrian, what are you doing?"He didn't answer her at all. He didn't even slow down.I felt the strength in his stride through my ribs, unhurried, as if carrying a stranger out of his own