The Mistress Loses

POV: Ava

Show me you mean it.

Dominic's words rode home with me the whole way back, tucked somewhere under my ribs where I could still feel them even after I'd stopped thinking about his voice.

I meant to.

The house was empty when I let myself in. Dillan at the office pretending to work, Sharon off somewhere being adored by someone, Dillon at school, blissfully unaware his whole world was about to start unravelling. I still had the spare key to Dillan's study, the one he didn't know I'd kept, and I let myself in and sat down at his computer the way I used to, back when he still trusted me enough to leave it unlocked at all.

His password hadn't changed in ten years. Neither had the arrogance that made him think it never needed to.

The presentation files were exactly where I expected, polished, complete, ready to be handed off to a room full of powerful men who would never guess they weren't looking at his work at all. I didn't delete anything. Deleted files ask questions. Corrupted ones simply look like bad luck.

I went in through the foundation instead, rebuilding the architecture from the inside the same careful way I'd built it the first time, except this version carried something new buried deep in its code, patient and harmless right up until the moment someone tried to open it in front of an audience. Then it would come apart at the seams, loudly, with nothing left afterward worth saving.

I closed the laptop, put everything back exactly the way I'd found it, and went upstairs to find something to wear that hadn't been chosen by a woman actively trying to end my life.

This time, I didn't go anywhere near the rooftop of the Halden. Instead, I arrived early at the real venue, a glass tower downtown with the Keller Group's name lit thirty stories high, and found myself shown, without quite understanding how, to a private room just off the main hall, where Dominic was standing at the window with a glass of something dark in his hand.

"You're early," he said, without turning around.

"You told me to show you I meant it. I couldn't very well do that from home."

He turned then, and his eyes moved over me slowly, unhurried, the same way they had that morning, and my stomach did the same slow, traitorous flip it had done then too.

"You look like a woman who's already won," he said.

"I look like a woman who hasn't lost yet. There's a difference."

The corner of his mouth lifted, just barely, and he crossed the room to stand closer than strictly necessary, close enough that I had to tip my chin up to hold his gaze. I bit down on my lip without meaning to, and his eyes dropped to the motion for a beat too long before they came back up to mine.

"Nervous?" he asked, low.

"Terrified," I admitted, because there didn't seem to be any point lying to him. "But not about the part you think."

"No?"

"I've spent ten years terrified of a man who doesn't value me, and never once looked at me the way you're looking at me right now." The words were out before I'd fully decided to say them, and I watched something flare behind his eyes, quick and unguarded, gone almost as soon as it appeared.

"I mean work. He never saw me as an asset, I was just his money cow. He needs my brain, but not my body, he's too ashamed to be seen anywhere near me and yet he married me to gain full control." I said it with a scoff at the end.

"But with you, at least I know what I'm signing up for. It's purely business. You won't use me selfishly or scheme behind my back. That's different," I said, half truth.

Neither of us said anything for a long moment. My phone started buzzing in my clutch, over and over, and I let it ring itself out while his eyes stayed on mine, steady, patient, like he had absolutely nowhere else in the world he needed to be.

"Your husband," he said finally, glancing at the phone.

"Soon-to-be ex-husband. He'll have realised by now that I'm not where he wants me to be."

"And where does he think you are?"

"Waiting for him somewhere I never intended to go." I finally picked up on the seventh call.

"How dare you keep me waiting, where the hell are you right now!" Dillan growled like a beast. I smiled, softening my voice into the small, apologetic shape I'd worn for a decade.

"I'm so sorry, I think there's been a mix-up. One of the maids mentioned a different venue this morning, and I thought I should check before the whole evening fell apart. I'm already here, actually. It's the Keller building, honey, do you want me to go on with the signing without you?" I asked, smiling to myself.

"Don't you fucking dare! I'll be there right now, nothing must happen to my contract before my arrival, Ava. Don't fucking play games with me!" he warned fiercely. The silent tension on the other end of the line was, on its own, worth every risk I'd taken to get here.

They arrived twenty minutes later, Dillan practically dragging Sharon through the lobby doors, both of them flushed and furious. He caught my arm the moment he reached me, his voice dropped low enough that only I could hear it.

"What makes you think you have the right to be here, let alone near my contract? Sit at the back right now, and behave. Do not embarrass me tonight, Ava, I mean it."

I let my eyes go wide and wounded. "I'm sorry, honey, I'll get out of the way right now, I won't embarrass you," I murmured, soft enough to satisfy him, and slipped into a seat near the rear of the room, every inch the obedient wife he still believed he'd married.

He had no idea what was already sitting inside his files, waiting for its moment, or that the woman he'd just scolded had spent the morning in a locked room with the man whose contract he was about to lose.

Dominic took the seat beside me without a word, close enough that I could feel the warmth of him along my arm, and neither of us looked at each other as Dillan and Sharon climbed the stage together.

For a few minutes I almost let myself enjoy it, the two of them standing shoulder to shoulder in front of the Keller Group's entire management team, Sharon glowing in a gown clearly tailored for this exact moment, Dillan introducing "our software" with the easy, borrowed confidence of a man who had never once had to build anything with his own hands.

Sharon stepped forward proudly to run the live demonstration. The instant she opened the file, the screen behind her convulsed, data unravelling in real time, code scrambling across every monitor in the room until the whole presentation dissolved into a wall of noise loud enough to make half the audience flinch.

She struck the keyboard again and again, hands visibly shaking, and only made it worse, the failure spreading through every backup file she tried in growing, undisguised panic. By the time it finally stopped, there was nothing left to show anyone at all.

Beside me, I felt Dominic go very still, and when I glanced over, he wasn't looking at the stage. He was looking at me, one eyebrow raised, something dark and amused and entirely too knowing in his expression. I bit my lip again, and his gaze dropped straight to it, and held there long enough that I felt the heat of it clear down to my toes.

"Careful," he murmured, so quietly it was barely more than breath. "A man could get the wrong idea, watching you enjoy this."

"Or the right one," I whispered back, and his mouth curved into something that wasn't quite a smile.

Onstage, someone from the management team asked, not unkindly, whether Sharon could simply recreate the design live, since she clearly knew it well enough to present it.

"You claim you're the designer, could you recreate it and walk us through the process so we can proceed with the contract signing?" he asked her. Her face went the colour of chalk.

She swayed, pressed a hand to her forehead, and folded gracefully into Dillan's arms in front of the entire room, gasping something about the heat, the stress, needing air. Dillan scooped her up as though she weighed nothing at all and turned to the stunned executives, begging for a few days' grace to "sort out this terrible misunderstanding" and rebuild the presentation properly.

He carried her out through the lobby doors like a man rushing his dying wife to hospital, and not a single person in that room suspected either of them of anything worse than very bad luck. I watched them go and smiled quietly into my glass.

"You did that," Dominic said, not a question, his voice pitched just for me.

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"No," he agreed, leaning close enough that his breath stirred against my ear, "I don't imagine you do."

I turned my head, and for one long, suspended second, his face was close enough that I could count the flecks of gold in his eyes, close enough that some reckless, starving part of me wanted to close the last few inches between us and find out exactly what his mouth felt like against mine. Ten years married to Dillan, and he had never once made my whole body feel like it was holding its breath the way one look from this man did.

I made myself lean back first.

Dominic let me, watching the whole retreat with quiet, unhurried satisfaction, like a man who already knew he wasn't in any hurry at all.

Nobody in that room so much as glanced at the naive, silent housewife sitting in the back. Not even her own husband.