Chapter 2

"Rosie."

The voice rolled out low and even, carrying none of the panic Selene expected from someone chasing a lost child through a heavy traffic. She turned towards it and found a man standing a few feet away, hands loose at his sides, dark coat settled over broad shoulders like he'd been born wearing it.

He didn't rush forward. He didn't raise his voice again. He simply waited, the way a man waits when he already knows how a situation will resolve.

Selene straightened, one arm still curved protectively around the girl clinging to her legs.

"Is she yours?" she asked, because someone had to say something, and the silence between strangers on a sidewalk had a way of turning things strange fast.

"She is." His eyes moved from Selene's face down to the small hands fisted in her skirt, and something in his expression shifted — not quite surprise, but close to it. "Rosie doesn't usually do this."

"Do what?"

"Attach herself to people." He crouched slightly, bringing himself to the girl's eye level without touching her. "Rosie. Come here."

Rosie burrowed deeper into the fabric of Selene's dress instead, turning her face away from her father entirely.

"I don't want to," she mumbled.

A muscle ticked at the corner of the man's jaw, though his voice stayed calm. "We talked about this."

"I like her," Rosie said, as if that settled every argument that could ever exist. She tilted her head up towards Selene, studying her, the unguarded way only children manage, checking every detail without shame. "You're beautiful."

The words landed somewhere Selene hadn't expected them to land — soft, unguarded, and nothing like the calculated compliments she'd spent years hearing, and learning to distrust in boardrooms and ballrooms. She felt her mouth curve before she'd decided to let it.

It was the first time she'd smiled since the ink dried on the divorce papers.

The man noticed. She caught it in the way his gaze lingered half a second longer than politeness required, something unreadable passing behind his eyes before he tucked it away.

"I apologize," he said, and he sounded like he meant it, though nothing in his posture suggested actual embarrassment. "She's not usually this forward with strangers."

"It's fine," Selene said. "She's sweet."

"She's stubborn." He held a hand out towards his daughter, patient in a way that suggested long practice. "Rosie. Now."

Rosie's fingers loosened, reluctantly, dragging against the fabric like she meant to leave a piece of herself behind in the weave. She looked back at Selene one more time before shuffling toward her father, small shoulders slumped in the universal posture of a child accepting defeat.

"Thank you," the man said to Selene, and there was something in the low register of his voice that made the words feel weightier than the situation called for. "For not scaring her off."

"She wasn't scared of me," Selene said. "I think that's the problem."

For the briefest moment, something almost like humor flickered across his face — there and gone before it could fully surface. He inclined his head, a small, formal gesture that belonged more in a boardroom than on a sidewalk outside a hotel still buzzing with reporters and scandal.

Then he took Rosie's hand and turned, disappearing into the black car waiting at the curb, its engine already idling low.

Selene stood there a moment longer, the cold air prickling against her arms, the hotel's golden light spilling out the revolving doors behind her like it belonged to a different night entirely. She lifted her arm for a cab, and one peeled away from traffic almost instantly, tires hissing against wet asphalt.

She climbed in without looking back at the hotel.

The city blurred past the window in smears of light — taxi horns, steam rising from a subway grate, someone's laughter carried on the wind and gone just as fast. She thought about Tristan's face when she signed the papers. She thought about Bianca's practiced tremble. And underneath all of it, unbidden, she thought about a small hand fisted in her skirt and a little girl's voice telling her she was beautiful like it was simply a fact of the world.

She'd never see them again. The thought settled in her chest, not quite disappointment, not quite relief. Just a fact, the way the city itself was full of a thousand people you'd meet once and never again.

Inside the car, Zayden watched his daughter buckle herself in with the brisk efficiency of a girl who insisted on doing things without help. Rosie stared out the window in the direction the taxi had gone, her small face pressed near the glass.

"You've never done that before," he said, finally.

Rosie didn't turn from the window. "Done what?"

"Run to a stranger, cling to someone you'd never met." He studied his daughter, searching her profile for the answer he already suspected he wouldn't fully understand. "You don't even let Grandma hug you without a fight."

Rosie considered this with the gravity of someone twice her age, brow furrowed, thumb tracing a line down the fogged glass.

"I like her," she said again, simple and unshakable, like the words closed a case that didn't need reopening.

Zayden looked out his own window, towards the hotel disappearing behind them, its windows glowing gold against the dark. He said nothing else the rest of the ride. But somewhere behind his composed expression, a thought had lodged itself and refused to leave — quiet, persistent, and entirely unfamiliar.

He didn't yet have a word for it. He only knew that for the first time in longer than he could remember, something about tonight had refused to stay where he'd put it.