Chapter 6 — Out By Midnight

POV: BEATRIX

The door had barely settled into its frame when Nikolai turned to face me, and whatever softness had been in his voice on the other side of that conversation with my mother was already gone.

"Pack a bag," he said.

"We're leaving tonight."

I stared at him, my hand still pressed to my cheek, my mind several sentences behind the conversation already moving forward without me.

"Tonight? It's almost midnight."

"That's the point."

He didn't explain right away.

He moved to my window instead, tilting his head to check the street below through a gap in the blinds, then letting the slats fall back into place with a soft, deliberate click — the kind of small, controlled motion I was beginning to realize was simply how he moved through the world: nothing wasted, nothing accidental.

"Julian already sold this address to a tabloid once," he said, without turning around.

"That's how the first photographers found you outside the arena two nights ago.

My security team flagged it when they ran a background check before I ever came to your door."

The words landed somewhere in the wreckage of the last hour and settled in beside everything else I couldn't process.

"You had someone run a background check on me?"

"I don't sign contracts with strangers." He finally turned, and his expression hadn't changed, still that same flat, assessing calm, though something in his eyes had sharpened.

"Your mother has a motive now that she didn't have an hour ago.

I'm not waiting to find out how fast she can dial a number."

Somewhere in my chest, the last of the adrenaline that had been holding me upright since the slap started to buckle, and my knees actually wavered before I locked them.

"What about Ivy?" I asked, because somehow, in the last hour, the eight-year-old asleep somewhere across town was the detail that finally cut through the fog.

"Is she still awake?"

"Asleep for hours," Nikolai said.

"She won't know anything happened until morning."

Something in his voice, a small crack of relief at not having to explain any of this to his daughter tonight, was the first thing all evening that felt entirely human.

"Okay," I said, because it was the only word I had left.

"Okay."

I moved through my apartment on instinct after that, some autopilot version of myself pulling a duffel bag from the closet, throwing in whatever my hands found first: sweaters, the one framed photo I actually cared about, a phone charger, a toothbrush still damp from that morning.

On top of the dresser, half buried under a stack of unopened mail, I found the receipt from the ring Julian had crushed under his heel three nights ago. I don't know why I kept it.

I stared at it for a long moment, then crumpled it once, hard, and left it on the dresser where it belonged, buried under mail I no longer had any reason to answer.

My hands wouldn't stop shaking.

Every few seconds, I caught myself glancing at the door, half expecting it to fly open again, half expecting to hear my mother's voice one more time.

Nikolai stepped into the hallway to make a call, low and clipped, arranging something I didn't have the bandwidth to follow. I heard fragments through the thin wall.

Have the west wing ready. No press releases until I say otherwise. Get Marcus back to the car.

I zipped the duffel with hands that still weren't entirely steady and sat down hard on the edge of my bed, staring at the four walls that had been my entire life for three years, trying to memorize them before I left, though I couldn't have said why that mattered.

The apartment had gone quiet.

I realized, several seconds too late, that Nikolai's voice had stopped somewhere down the hall, and the low murmur of the phone call had been replaced by something else entirely: the small, familiar creak of my refrigerator door opening in the kitchen.

***

POV: NIKOLAI

I’d been awake for nineteen hours when I hung up the phone in Beatrix Holloway's narrow, poorly lit hallway, and I still had no intention of stopping.

The security report had landed on my desk two days ago, before I'd ever laid eyes on her in person: a woman named Beatrix Holloway, twenty-six years old, in a relationship with a man named Julian Vance, who had apparently spent the previous week quietly shopping details of their relationship to two different gossip outlets in exchange for a modest f*e.

I hadn't thought much of it at the time. It was background noise, just one more petty betrayal among the hundreds that crossed my desk each month.

I hadn't expected to end up married to the woman in question by midnight.

I stood in her kitchen a moment longer than I needed to, listening to the silence from the bedroom, and thought about the sound her mother's hand had made against her face.

It was loud enough to hear from across the room.

Loud enough that some old, useless instinct in me, one I'd spent years training out of existence, had wanted to put my fist through the wall beside the door instead of standing there calmly asking questions.

I had not expected to feel anything at all tonight. That had not been part of the arrangement.

I had learned a long time ago what happens to a man who lets himself want things.

I had built an entire life on the wreckage of that lesson, brick by brick, room by room, until the wanting simply stopped, or at least stopped announcing itself loudly enough to notice.

I did not examine, while standing in a stranger's kitchen at midnight with my hand on her freezer door, why tonight of all nights it had started announcing itself again.

I opened the freezer door and found exactly what I expected to find in an apartment this size: a single ice tray, half full, and nothing else.

I cracked it against the counter, wrapped the shards in a dish towel that smelled faintly of her, some soft, warm scent I couldn't immediately place and didn't have time to examine, and carried it down the hall.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed when I found her, staring at nothing, a duffel bag zipped and waiting beside her feet like it belonged to someone else's life.

A faint bruise had already begun to form on her cheek, blooming just beneath her eye.

I didn't say anything.

I hadn't planned what to say, and every version I ran through in the half-second it took to cross the room sounded either clinical or absurd, so I said nothing at all.

Instead, I crouched in front of her and held out the towel until she took it, then pressed it against her face with a small, sharp intake of breath.

She didn't ask why I'd done it.

Neither of us spoke for a moment that ran half a beat too long, her eyes searching my face for an answer I clearly didn't have ready.

For the length of that silence, I let her look, because turning away first would have meant admitting there was something on my face worth finding.

Her eyes came up to mine, startled, like she hadn't expected this from me any more than I had expected it from myself.

I stood before she could say anything, before I had to explain a gesture I couldn't fully explain to myself.

Whatever this was, it hadn't been in the contract.

I had built my entire adult life around the discipline of not wanting things I couldn't control, and something about the way she'd flinched at her own mother's touch had cut straight through twenty years of that discipline and found something underneath it I thought I'd buried a long time ago.

"We should go," I said, and my voice came out rougher than I intended.

She nodded, pressed the ice harder against her cheek, and stood.

I carried her bag myself.

It weighed almost nothing, which bothered me more than I expected it to: an entire life, packed into something I could sling over one shoulder without breaking stride.

She followed me down through the narrow stairwell in silence, and I found myself matching my pace to hers without deciding to, one hand hovering near the small of her back the entire way down, close enough to catch her if the adrenaline finally gave out from under her, not close enough to touch.

The lobby door opened onto a street already crawling with light.

Not the soft amber glow of the streetlamps.

Camera flashes; three at first, then five, then a dozen—flashed white against the wet pavement as photographers who had clearly been tipped off surged toward the entrance the moment they spotted us.

Someone shouted her name.

Someone shouted mine.

A microphone appeared out of the crowd, shoved toward her face, and I watched her flinch backward directly into me.

Beatrix went rigid against me, her whole body flinching at each fresh burst of light, and I felt, more than saw, the exact moment panic started to climb out of whatever composure she had left.

A man's voice, louder than the rest, shouted something crude about the timeline of her engagement, a question clearly designed to draw blood rather than information, and my vision actually narrowed at the edges for half a second before I forced it back into focus.

I put my arm around her before I'd even finished deciding to, pulling her against my side and angling my body between her and the nearest lens on pure reflex—the same reflex that had wanted to put a fist through her wall an hour earlier.

Whatever I had told myself this arrangement would be, standing on that sidewalk with her flinching against my chest and a dozen cameras screaming our names into the dark, I understood, with a clarity that unsettled me more than anything Martha Holloway had done tonight, that I no longer entirely believed it.