Se connecterAdrian POVI closed the cabin door behind me.The tie came off first. I loosened it and threw it across the desk without looking where it landed. Two buttons at the collar, undone. I pressed my palm flat against the glass wall and stood there.Fuming."What the fuck", I curse under my breath.I pushed off the glass and started moving. Left to right. The length of the room and back. My fingers dragged through my hair roughly, pulling at the roots like that would somehow untangle the mess inside my head."How did I make such a mistake", I mumble to myself.I had checked my own schedule. Cleared my evening. Planned the whole thing around a window I had made deliberately, carefully. And then completely failed to account for the fact that my assistant had his own schedule. His own life. A life that apparently included dinner with Leon."How can I check my schedule but not his?", I facepalm myself.What was I even thinking. Just because my evening was free did not mean his was. I was paying
Ethan's POVThe confession sat in the air between us like something fragile that neither of us knew how to pick up.Leon exhaled slowly after saying it, the way people do when they have been carrying something for too long and have finally, at great cost, set it down. His shoulders dropped. The tension that had been holding his body together for the last few minutes loosened visibly.He looked relieved.I felt nothing of the sort.I was frozen in the exact position I had been in when the words left his mouth, one hand still holding the edge of his blanket, my breath caught somewhere between my chest and my throat, my mind completely and utterly blank. The kind of blank that is not peaceful. The kind that comes from the sudden absence of every coherent thought at once.I did not move.I did not speak.I simply stood there, wrestling with something I had no name for yet."I like you a lot, Ethan," he said again.Quieter this time. More certain. Like saying it twice made it more real, or
Ethan's POV By 7:45 PM the last file was closed, the last email sent, and the three of us were finally done pretending the day had not already wrung us completely dry.Leon had been waiting near the lobby with his car keys and that particular smile of his, the one that meant he had already decided how the evening was going to go and was simply waiting for everyone else to catch up.I did not argue.I was too tired to argue.The drive to the Lotus Resort took about twenty minutes, and nothing could have prepared me for what waited on the other side of those gates.It was the kind of place that made you forget you had spent the last ten hours staring at spreadsheets. The architecture was sweeping and deliberate, designed nine years ago by a firm whose name I vaguely remembered seeing in a magazine. Deep sea blue pools caught the last light of the evening sky and held it there like something precious. Lotus structures rose at careful intervals across the property, each one detailed so p
Ethan's POVBy the time I reached the office, the warmth from my morning visit to Aunt Candia's house had settled into something quieter. The kind of calm that comes after a good visit, the kind that makes the rest of the day feel almost manageable.Almost.The floor was alive with its usual rhythm. Phones ringing, keyboards clicking, someone from the finance team rushing past me with a stack of folders pressed against their chest like they were carrying something fragile. I fell into the pace of it easily, the way you fall into a familiar song.As I passed Adrian's cabin, I glanced through the glass walls out of habit.He was having lunch with Noah.The two of them sat across from each other with Noah's tablet propped between their plates, some document pulled up on the screen. Noah looked relaxed, leaning slightly forward, gesturing with his fork, occasionally smiling at whatever point he was making. Adrian looked like Adrian. Focused. Still. Completely unreadable in the way that ha
Chapter — Ethan POVI woke before the alarm.The room was still gray, that particular quiet that exists only in the hour before the city remembers itself. I lay still for a moment, orienting. The warmth beside me. The steady sound of his breathing.Adrian was asleep.Deeply, genuinely asleep in the way he rarely allowed himself to be. On his back, one arm loose at his side, the sharp lines of his face softened into something almost peaceful. I watched him for longer than I should have. Something in my chest did a slow, inconvenient thing that I chose not to examine.I got up carefully.Dressed quickly in the half dark, moving without sound, muscle memory handling the buttons and the buckle while my mind stayed half in the room, half already on the road. I checked myself in the mirror once. Ran a hand through my hair.Then I went back to him.I do not know what made me do it. Some pull I did not think to resist. I leaned over him and pressed my lips to his forehead, soft and brief, bar
Adrian POVThe night had been warm.That kind of warm that settles under your skin and stays there. We had been somewhere past the point of teasing, past the careful restraint we usually kept between us, raw and unguarded and reaching for something neither of us had named yet.And then my phone rang.I ignored it the first time. Kept my focus where it was. But it rang again. And again. Persistent and merciless, the way only certain calls are.I pulled back with a low exhale. Looked at the screen. Pressed a brief kiss to his temple and told him to sleep. That these calls run long. That I would handle it.He made a soft sound of protest but did not argue.It ended in half an hour. Shorter than I expected. I set my phone down with something almost like relief and came back to his room, already half smiling at whatever expression he would give me.He was asleep.Deeply, genuinely asleep this time. No performance. Just him curled against the pillow, lashes still, breathing slow and even.I
Ethan's POV The café hummed around us, indifferent to the quiet storm brewing at our table. The kind of place that smells like roasted beans and soft conversations — warm, but hollow when you're not really there. I was nursing my third cup of coffee, the rim of the mug cool against my lips, when m
Seraphina's POV:The ride back to the villa was quiet in the way that expensive cars always were — insulated, sealed, the outside world reduced to a blur of streetlights and shadow beyond tinted glass. I sat beside Adrian in the gun shot seat, as I closely observe him.Sharp jaw. Sharper eyes, even
Adrian's POV:The car is already running.Seraphina gets in without being told to. I notice that. I notice everything, it is not a choice, it is just how the mind works when you have spent enough years in rooms where missing something small gets people killed. She gets in, pulls the door shut, sett
Adrian's POV:They're already seated when I walk in.That's the rule. Not written anywhere. Not announced to anyone new. Just understood, the way everything in this world is understood, through watching what happens to those who forget.The room rises the second I step through the door. Not out of




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