Chapter 7

She told Kane about the photograph at breakfast.

She laid her phone on the kitchen island face-up and watched him look at it — the hotel bathroom, the test in the bin, the two pink lines that were nobody's business but hers and now apparently someone else's. His jaw set in the way she was beginning to recognize: a line being crossed, a decision being made, very calmly.

"Alexander knows?" he asked.

"First thing this morning. He's running the trace. Relay routing — it'll take a day or two."

"And the pregnancy. Who else knows?"

"The brothers. You now, apparently." She took her phone back. "And whoever sent this."

He looked up at her then. Something careful and deliberate. "Are you all right?"

Not clinical. Not strategic. Just straight.

"I will be," she said. Because it was truer than fine and he deserved the truth.

He nodded. He didn't push. She appreciated that more than she could say.

— ✦ —

The nausea arrived on the fourth morning like an uninvited guest who had somehow obtained a key. Lila was halfway through the first Kingsley Dynamics pitch deck when the room tilted and her stomach made its position very clear.

She moved to the guest bathroom, locked the door, and sat on the cool tile for six minutes — which felt, given recent events, like a reasonable amount of time to spend on bathroom floors. When she came out, Kane was in the hallway.

He was holding a mug. Steam curling from it. He held it out without a word.

"Ginger tea," she said.

"Rosa keeps it in the pantry." He leaned against the wall, giving her space. "My sister had bad morning sickness. I learned fast."

She took the mug. The warmth moved through her palms. She wrapped both hands around it and stood there in her socks and her work blouse and felt something crack, very slightly, in the wall she'd been reinforcing since Monday night. Not the wall — just a hairline fracture. Just enough to let something warm through.

"Your sister know about me?" she asked.

"She saw the photos. Texted forty-seven times. I read seventeen." His mouth moved. "Variations on: she's out of your league, don't ruin it."

Lila almost laughed. The first real one since the elevator. It startled her enough that she pressed her lips together to hold it in.

He caught it anyway. His eyes softened at the edges in a way the rest of his face didn't quite match.

"Back to work," she said, and walked past him down the hall.

— ✦ —

Kingsley Dynamics launched its public identity on Thursday. Lila stood in a dove-grey suit before a full press room and spoke for seven minutes — no notes, no nerves, every hostile question answered with precise, pleasant calm. Two of Damian's allies in the financial press visibly recalibrated mid-sentence.

Tyler texted afterward: Dad would have cried. I almost did. Don't tell Gavin.

Kane said nothing when she walked past him to the car. He waited until they were moving.

"You've done that before. Stood in a room like that."

"I ran Damian's donor presentations for three years." She kept her eyes on the window. "He was always the face. I was always the one who actually knew the material."

A pause. Then: "His loss," Kane said.

She turned back to the window so he wouldn't see what her face did.

— ✦ —

By week's end the Kingsleys had poached Damian's head of R&D — Dr. James Osei, architect of the entire Voss AI roadmap — with a three-hundred-percent raise and full creative autonomy. Voss stock dropped another four points. Damian appeared on three morning programs in four days wearing the expression of a man holding something enormous together through sheer will. He never said Lila's name on air. He said personal matters once and shut down the follow-up with a single look that made the host blink.

She watched the clips with her ginger tea and felt the uncomfortable truth that even now, even after everything, he was still good at this. Still someone she had once watched across a boardroom and thought: that man is going to change something.

She closed the tab. Opened the Kingsley Dynamics metrics instead.

Numbers didn't kiss someone else and call it love. Numbers didn't make promises in the dark and leave them when the light came on. Numbers, at least, were honest.

She was deep in revenue projections when Kane appeared in the study doorway, jacket off, sleeves rolled, a slight furrow between his brows.

"Rosa made pasta. Come down."

"I'm working."

"So am I. Come down anyway." He was already gone.

She sat there four seconds, then saved the document and followed him.

They ate at the kitchen island with the ocean dark outside. Somehow the meal lasted an hour. They argued about a book they'd both read, in ways that turned out to be interesting. At some point Kane refilled her water glass without being asked, and the ease of it — simple, unremarkable — settled over her like something she hadn't known she was missing.

She was still thinking about it when she climbed the stairs. When her suite door swung open without a knock and Kane stepped in — not aggressive, just purposeful — his face showing something she hadn't seen on it before.

He had a piece of paper in his hand. He had clearly been running.

✦ ✦ ✦

A sonogram printout. A clinic header. Her name. A date from two days ago — forwarded anonymously to his personal email with four words beneath the image:

Ask her whose it is.

Kane's jaw was tight. His eyes were on her face — careful and fierce and full of a question he hadn't decided yet whether he had the right to ask.

The room was very quiet.

"Lila," he said.