MasukAlexander's POV Marcus found me at the practice facility two days after the game, waiting by my car in the players' lot with the particular patient stillness of a man who had something worth waiting for. "I have something on the holding company," he said, without preamble. "The one that owned the property where Damien met the masked figure." "Tell me." "It took weeks to trace properly because of how many layers were built into the structure. Four shell companies, like I told you originally. But the fifth one, the one underneath all of them, the actual entity that ultimately owns the property, is registered to a charitable foundation." That was not what I expected. "A charity." "A small one. Focused on youth athletics, scholarship funding, that kind of thing. Respectable on its face, the sort of organization that sponsors junior league tournaments and gets a polite mention in local papers once a year." Marcus paused. "I would not have thought twice about it, except for one detai
Elena's Pov I burned the first batch of sourdough completely the next morning, something I had not done since my very first nervous weeks learning to bake under Miss Clara's patient supervision. I stood staring at the blackened, ruined loaves for a long moment before I let myself acknowledge why. I kept seeing Damien's face in that arena hallway, pleasant and composed, the particular delicate emphasis he had placed on certain words. I think about you often. More than you probably realize. The memory kept surfacing at the worst possible moments, intruding on the careful rhythm of measuring and kneading and watching the clock, until an entire tray had gone well past where it should have come out. "Well," Miss Clara said, surveying the damage with her hands on her hips. "That is certainly something." "I am sorry," I said. "I will redo it." "I am not asking you to apologize, child. I am asking what happened in your head, because that bread did not burn itself." I told her, halting
Elena's POV I saw him during the second intermission. The entire arena seemed to tilt slightly around the fact of it before I had even fully processed what I was looking at. Damien was sitting in a private box on the far side of the arena, the kind reserved for sponsors and league officials, a glass of something amber in his hand. His attention apparently fixed on the ice below even though play had stopped. He was not looking at me. He did not appear to be looking at anything in particular except the empty rink. But something about the deliberate stillness of him, the way he held himself in that box like he wanted to be noticed without seeming to want anything at all, told me he knew exactly where I was sitting. My smile, which had been easy and unguarded only seconds earlier while Jemima recapped the last goal in exhaustive detail, disappeared so quickly I felt it go. Jemima noticed first, glancing at my face and then following my gaze across the arena. "Oh," she said quie
Alexander's POV Carter caught me checking my phone for the third time in the locker room before warmups even started, and he did not bother pretending he had not noticed. "She is not here yet," he said. "The game does not start for another forty minutes. You can stop checking." "I am not checking anything." "You are absolutely checking something." He pulled his jersey over his head, voice muffled for a second before emerging clearer. "You know you have looked at Section 112 six times already since we walked out for warmups." "I have not." "You just did it again." I had not realized I was doing it until he said it out loud. The particular automatic pull of my eyes toward the section where Jemima had told me, with great confidence, that the seats were the best in the building. It was still mostly empty, the arena filling slowly the way it always did before a big game, ushers moving through the aisles, vendors calling out over the rising noise. "It is a big game," I sai
Elena's POV Marcus came to the bakery himself the next morning, before Miss Clara had even arrived, and instead of telling me what the new security plan was going to be. He sat down across the small table by the window and asked me what I wanted it to look like. "I want to understand your daily rhythm," he said, notebook open but pen still resting on the page. "Not so I can tell you how to change it. So I can build protection around the life you actually want to keep living." I looked at him for a moment, a little thrown by the question itself, by the simple fact that someone in this entire arrangement was asking rather than deciding. "I want to keep opening at six," I said slowly, testing the words. "I do not want someone standing visibly outside the door all day. It would frighten the customers, and it would make this place feel like something it is not supposed to feel like." "That is fair," Marcus said, writing it down. "We can keep the visible presence light during op
Damien's POV Pavel called me a little after nine that night, and the first thing I noticed, before he had even said a full sentence, was the careful neutrality in his voice, the particular flatness of a man delivering news he already knew would not be well received. "It did not go as planned," he said. "What does that mean?" "My man approached her successfully. Delivered the message exactly as discussed. No physical contact, nothing that crosses any line we agreed on." A pause. "But St. James's security responded faster than we accounted for. They had someone at her location within minutes. And St. James himself arrived shortly after that." "So she is frightened," I said. "That was the point." "She is frightened," Pavel agreed. "She is also, as of tonight, surrounded by a security response that has clearly been completely overhauled. My contact inside their rotation tells me the gap we identified no longer exists. They closed it within hours." I sat with that for a mom
Elena's povThree days.That was how long I stayed in that house after I asked for a divorce. Three of the longest, most suffocating days of my life.Damien and I didn't speak. We moved around each other like strangers who happened to share the same walls. He left early. He came back late. Sometime
Elena's POVThe word hung in the air between us.Divorce.I had said it. Actually said it. Out loud to his face.And for a long, terrifying second, Damien just stared at me. Like the word didn't compute. Like his brain needed extra time to process the fact that his quiet, patient, always-waiting wi
Elena's POVI sat on the floor, my trembling hand still pressed against the cheek that stung badly from the slap Damien gave me.Georgina let out a soft whimper, remaining on the floor, clutching her leg dramatically as tears shimmered in her eyes. Looking up at Damien, she appeared fragile and bro
Elena's POVDamien and Georgina disentangled from each other the moment they noticed me standing at the doorway. For a second, nobody moved. I stood frozen in place, staring at them while confusion flooded every corner of my mind.Why had Damien been holding her like that?My eyes remained fixed on







