로그인Katia’s POVSam sat across from my desk with her tablet open and that look she got when she already knew the answer but wanted me to say it out loud.“Why did Delia make an appointment?” she asked.I kept scrolling through the quarterly numbers on my screen.“I don’t give much of a shit,” I said. “I’ve been civil. I’ve answered her calls. I’ve stayed out of the press when she tried to drag me into it. She still treats me like I personally ordered her to play house with a man who never wanted her. That’s her problem, not mine.”Sam raised an eyebrow.“She’s listed under Vesper Group. Same company that sent the gala invitations.”“I noticed.”“You going to take the meeting?”“She’s already on the calendar. Cancelling now just gives her another story to sell. Let her come. I’ll listen. Then I’ll send her back to whoever is pulling her strings.”Sam opened her mouth to say something else when my phone lit up with Julian’s name. I answered on speaker.“You’re on speaker with Sam,” I said.
~Delia~Noah called me into his office two days before the gala, a single folder sitting closed on the black stone desk between us."I need you to arrange a meeting," he said, without any of his usual preamble. "With Julian Windsor. Vesper Group would like to invest in WEG before the gala takes place. It would strengthen everything we are trying to build here, having our name tied to WEG's before the launch rather than after."I nodded, writing the note down on my tablet without fully processing what he had actually asked me to do."I can reach out to his office today," I said. "Set something up before the end of the week.""Good," Noah said. "Make it happen."I left his office feeling, for the first time since signing the contract, something close to useful in a way that had nothing to do with seating charts or guest lists. This felt like real work, the kind of assignment that might actually prove to Noah I belonged in rooms larger than the ones I had spent the last several days arra
Delia’s POVNoah Vesper’s office sat on the top floor of the same glass building. The desk was black stone. The chairs were low enough that anyone sitting across from him had to look up. I noticed that the second I walked in.He did not stand when I entered. He pointed at the chair opposite him with two fingers.“Sit.”I sat and placed the printed guest list and seating chart on the desk between us and kept my back straight.Noah picked up the first page and scanned it in silence. His eyes moved slowly. When he reached the top of the list, he stopped.“Windsor, Julian, and Katia,” he read aloud. “Main table. Center seats.”He looked up at me.“Explain.”“They are the most powerful couple in the city right now,” I said. “Every donor on this list watches what the Windsors do. If they attend and sit anywhere else, people will assume Vesper Group is either afraid of them or not important enough to keep them close. Either way, it hurts the launch.”Noah set the page down.“You spent two ye
~Julian~The invitation arrived on heavy cream cardstock, the kind of weight that announced money before a single word was read, sitting on top of the morning mail Katia had left for me on the kitchen counter.Vesper Group. An Evening of Introduction. The chief executive officer of Vesper Group cordially invites you to celebrate the launch of New York's newest private investment firm.I turned it over in my hands, studying the embossed lettering, the careful, expensive restraint of the design."Have you heard of them?" Katia asked, setting a cup of tea down beside Aiden's breakfast plate across the kitchen island."No," I said. "Which is unusual. A company with money enough to send invitations like this should have crossed my desk at some point over the last several months.""Maybe they are new," Katia said."New companies with this much capital rarely stay quiet for long," I said. "Someone is going out of their way to control how much attention they attract before their official laun
~Delia~I sat in my new corner office on the fourth floor, the guest list spreadsheet open in front of me, and stared at the cursor blinking beside the first empty row for longer than I wanted to admit.This was the easy part. I had spent years learning exactly which families mattered in this city, which names opened doors, and which ones simply decorated the room without moving anything forward. I could build this list in my sleep.The problem was not knowing who belonged on it.The problem was that I knew, and hated, exactly who had to be at the top.I typed the name anyway.Windsor, Julian, and Katia.My jaw tightened just looking at it on the screen, the two names sitting there together, official, permanent, exactly the way they had been announced to the entire city weeks earlier while I stood in the wreckage of everything I had spent two years pretending to have. I wanted to delete it. I wanted to build a guest list that erased them entirely, that let me stand in a room full of t
Delia’s POVI needed money and I needed a way back into rooms that had started closing their doors on me.The headlines had not stopped. Every time I opened my phone, there was another photo of my face, another article calling me the woman who had claimed a marriage that never existed. My father’s house felt like a cage. The few people who still answered my calls spoke carefully around me, like they were afraid my failure might rub off on them.So when the message came from a man named Adrian Hale requesting a meeting about a private organizational opportunity, I answered.We met on the forty-second floor of a glass building in Midtown. The office was quiet, all clean lines and expensive silence. Adrian Hale was tall, in his mid-thirties, in a dark suit, and had the kind of smile that never reached his eyes. He slid a black folder across the table toward me.“Vesper Group is preparing its public launch in New York,” he said. “We need someone who already knows the city’s elite. Someone
~Katia~“Get out!” my mom screamed, her voice tearing through the hallway like a bomb going off in a small room.The sound hit the walls and bounced back so violently, like the house itself was flinching. Even the air felt startled, buzzing with the kind of tension that makes your skin crawl. My he
~Katia~I woke up to the sour taste of bile creeping up my throat, and my legs threw me out of bed before my brain could even catch up. The morning light seared into my eyes like punishment, and I stumbled across the cold floor, my feet slapping against the wood, straight into the bathroom. My knee
~Katia~"Do you know how hard I've been holding myself?" I didn't answer because all I wanted was to get laid. I could still feel the ache between my legs. He carried my bridal style and led me to his hotel room. "Now, I can fuck you however I want because you are now my wife, princess." The room
~Katia~Vegas heat hit me like a wave the second I stepped off the private jet. The runway shimmered under the late afternoon sun, and I squinted past my sunglasses, already half-listening to the ping of updates on my encrypted racing burner phone. Six hours before the race, and my heart was alread







