LOGIN~ Lorenzo's POVI have planned very few things in my life with joy.Planning, in my experience, had always been a function of necessity rather than pleasure, the cold and structural work of someone who understood that outcomes required architecture and that architecture required precision and that precision left no room for the kind of looseness that joy introduced. I had planned business manoeuvres and legal strategies and the slow dismantling of family empires, and I had done all of it with the focused detachment of a man who understood that emotional investment in a plan was a liability rather than an asset.Planning the wedding was different.I noticed this about myself with the slightly bemused quality of a man encountering a version of himself he had not previously had occasion to meet. I sat across from Vivienne in my apartment three days after the car park with a notepad between us that had been her idea and which I had initially regarded as unnecessary, and I found myself wit
~ Lorenzo's POVShe looked at the ring on her finger for a long moment before she looked at me.I watched her do it. I had time, because she was not a woman who moved through significant moments without examining them, and I had learned that about her early and had stopped trying to rush her through the processing of things she needed to process. The ring sat on her finger in the pale afternoon light, a simple and substantial thing, not decorative in the excessive way that rings sometimes were, just a diamond of particular quality in a setting that I had chosen because it looked like something she might have chosen herself, clean-lined and without performance.Her face was doing several things at once.I could read most of them. The joy was present and clear, the specific brightness of it in her eyes that she was making no effort to contain, which was itself significant because Vivienne's default was containment and the absence of it meant something. But underneath the joy there was s
~ Vivienne's POVI stared at him."Marco," I said."Yes.""Marco killed Richard Blackwell.""Yes."I turned the information over in my mind the way you turned something fragile over, carefully and with the awareness that its full weight had not yet been felt. Marco, who had stood in that meeting room doorway with his prepared voice and his selected witnesses and his finger pointing at Lorenzo with the performance of a man who had arrived to discover something rather than a man who had arranged it. Marco, who had accused Lorenzo in a room that he had already been inside before Lorenzo arrived. Marco, whose motive I could construct in my sleep, the inheritance, the board, the slow and inexorable movement of the Blackwell group's power in a direction that was not his."How did you find out?" I asked.Lorenzo looked at me with the particular patience of someone waiting for a question to catch up with its own answer."Lorenzo.""Who do you think I am, Vivienne?" he said, not unkindly.I he
~ Vivienne's POVI stared at him."Marco," I said."Yes.""Marco killed Richard Blackwell.""Yes."I turned the information over in my mind the way you turned something fragile over, carefully and with the awareness that its full weight had not yet been felt. Marco, who had stood in that meeting room doorway with his prepared voice and his selected witnesses and his finger pointing at Lorenzo with the performance of a man who had arrived to discover something rather than a man who had arranged it. Marco, who had accused Lorenzo in a room that he had already been inside before Lorenzo arrived. Marco, whose motive I could construct in my sleep, the inheritance, the board, the slow and inexorable movement of the Blackwell group's power in a direction that was not his."How did you find out?" I asked.Lorenzo looked at me with the particular patience of someone waiting for a question to catch up with its own answer."Lorenzo.""Who do you think I am, Vivienne?" he said, not unkindly.I he
~ Vivienne's POVSomeone grabbed my arm.It was one of the security staff, a broad-shouldered man whose name I had never learned despite passing him at the entrance desk every morning for two years, and he was holding my arm with the firm and well-intentioned grip of someone performing their function correctly."Ma'am, you can't go back in. The building is being evacuated, you need to stay—""Let go of my arm," I said.The tone of my voice was not a tone I used often and it surprised him enough that his grip loosened by a fraction, and that fraction was sufficient. I pulled free and walked toward the entrance.Two more people moved to intercept me before I reached the doors, one of the facility's safety officers and a woman from the administrative floor whose name I knew was Sandra and who was saying something sensible and urgent that I was not processing. I went around the safety officer and through the doors before Sandra could complete her sentence, and behind me I heard voices esc
~ Vivienne's POVI did not book any flights.I had said it with the conviction of someone who meant it, and in the moment of saying it I had meant it, or had meant the feeling underneath it, the desperate need to put distance between myself and the proximity of everything that Lorenzo's world contained. But when I sat down the next morning with my laptop open and the travel search page loaded, I stared at the departure fields for a long time and then closed the laptop and made coffee instead.Dante was here. His school was here. His doctors were here, the team monitoring his recovery from the procedure, the follow-up appointments that were still ongoing and that I was not willing to interrupt for the sake of my own need to feel like I was taking decisive action. I told myself these were the reasons. They were real reasons. They were also, I was aware, doing some additional work beyond simply being true.So I stayed, and I avoided Lorenzo, and I discovered that avoiding Lorenzo Blackwe
~ Vivienne's POVLorenzo took me to the small private waiting area at the end of the corridor outside the lab, a room that existed for exactly this kind of purpose, beige walls and upholstered chairs and a window that looked out onto the side of another building. I had walked past it hundreds of ti
~ Vivienne's POVFear consumed me entirely as I pressed harder on the accelerator, my car weaving through traffic at speeds that would have terrified me under normal circumstances. But these weren't normal circumstances. My son was in the hospital. My baby had collapsed. Nothing else mattered.The
- LORENZOShe was sweet. The taste of the wine that she drank lingered in her mouth. Her strong perfume registered itself in my brain and I drowned in her sweet, seductive fragrance, not willing to let her out of my grasp. I could almost feel her body melting under my touch. My hand slid around
~VIVIENNEMy head was reeling. I couldn't believe all that had just happened and was still happening. I had made elaborate plans just to attend this engagement throw it into chaos. And it had played out well until... until...!Until he showed up!This devil of a man, Lorenzo... He was a Blackwell







