My Ex-fiance's Uncle won't let me go

Ivy's POV

The flash went off before Ivy Callahan even got the car door open.

"Ms. Callahan! Is it true Julian Ashford was seen leaving the Меridian Hotel with another woman?"

She didn't answer. She never answered — that was rule one. Rule two was to smile like nothing was wrong, even when everything was. Rule three, the one she'd learned the hard way, was never let them see you run.

So she walked. Heels steady on wet pavement, blazer buttoned, phone already dialing Julian's line for the fourth time in twenty minutes.

He picked up on the fifth ring. "Ivy, it's not what it looks like—"

"Save it for someone who still believes you." She cut through the side entrance, past the two junior publicists she'd sent ahead to intercept the photographers loitering by the valet stand. "I need you out the back in the next ten minutes or this is on every sports blog in the city by morning."

"You're overreacting."

She stopped walking.

Three years of managing other people's disasters had taught Ivy exactly what a lie sounded like right before it collapsed, and Julian's voice had just cracked straight down the middle. She looked up — and through the hotel's glass doors, past the marble lobby, she saw him. Her fiancé. They are both stepping out of the elevator with his hand at the small of a woman's back, laughing at something she'd said, looking nothing like a man in the middle of a career-ending scandal and everything like a man who'd forgotten he had a fiancée at all.

Ivy had built her entire career on controlling the story. She had never once, in three years, let herself become the story.

She hung up the phone before she could hear whatever excuse came next, turned on her heel, and walked straight into the side lot where she'd parked — foot on the gas a beat too early, mind still back in that lobby, eyes stinging in a way she refused to name.

The crunch of metal on metal snapped her back into her body.

"Oh my God—" She was out of the car before she'd even registered putting it in park, already reaching for her phone to call it in, already rehearsing an apology for whatever poor soul she'd just rear-ended in the middle of the worst night of her professional life.

The man stepping out of the other car did not look like he needed an apology.

He looked like he owned the block.

Ivy's mouth opened — a sentence about insurance, about being so sorry, about how none of this was normally how her nights went — and then he turned around, and every word she'd been about to say died somewhere in her throat.

"Roman."

He went very still.

Three years had done something unfair to Roman Ashford. He'd been beautiful before, in the reckless, too-confident form of a twenty-four-year-old who'd already conquered the ice and hadn't yet learned what it cost to lose something that mattered. Now there was a stillness to him that hadn't existed before — the kind that came from winning so many times you stopped celebrating and started expecting it.

His eyes moved from her face to her left hand, to the ring catching the streetlight.

Ivy watched something behind his expression shut like a door.

"You're engaged," he said. Not a question.

"Roman, I can explain the car, I'll cover the—"

"To my nephew."

The words landed like a hit she hadn't seen coming, and for one terrible second Ivy couldn't remember how to breathe, she didn't see that coming. Nephew. Not a business associate. Not a stranger she'd tangle with once and never see again. Julian's uncle. Which meant the Ashford name stitched into every headline about her cheating fiancé belonged to the one man she had spent three years trying to forget existed.

"I didn't know," she managed. "I swear I didn't know he was—"

"Family." Roman finished the sentence for her, and something in his voice had gone dangerously quiet. "Small world, Wren."

Wren. Nobody had called her that in three years. She'd buried that name along with everything else from before, even before the injury, before she'd rebuilt herself into someone unbreakable, before she'd let a stubborn, arrogant hockey star convince her that love was worth the risk.

He stepped closer, and Ivy made herself hold her ground even as her pulse betrayed her completely.

"I have to go," she said.

Roman didn't move out of her way. He looked at her the way he used to look at an empty net — like the outcome was already decided, and everyone else just hadn't caught up yet.

"Not yet," he said. "Not this time."

Roman's POV

Roman Ashford had rebuilt an empire out of losses smaller than this one.

He'd learned, over three years, exactly how to survive the moment something he wanted got taken away — head down, jaw locked, keep moving until the ache turned into something he could use instead of something that used him. It had worked on every front except this one.

And now she was standing eight feet away from him in a hotel parking lot with a Callahan family crisis unraveling behind her and his own nephew's ring on her finger, and every carefully rebuilt piece of him wanted to put his fist through the nearest window.

Engaged. To Julian. His own blood.

He should have felt nothing. He'd told himself for three years that he felt nothing — that Wren Callahan, the woman who'd vanished without a word and left him a note instead of an explanation, was a chapter he had told himself he'd closed a long time ago. He'd almost believed it, right up until she said his name and every rebuilt wall in his chest came down at once.

She was talking — something about insurance, about the car, professional and clipped in a way that made his teeth ache because he remembered exactly what her voice sounded like when it wasn't. When it was soft, and only for him, back before she'd decided he wasn't worth staying for.

"I have to go," she said again, sharper this time.

He should let her.

He didn't.

"You're going to marry him," Roman said instead, and hated how much it cost him to say it out loud. "Julian."

Something flickered across her face — too fast to name, but he'd spent a career reading what people didn't want him to see. The doubt. She wasn't sure. Or she was sure, and hated the answer.

"That's none of your business," she said.

"You made it my business the second you drove into my car wearing his ring."

Her chin lifted. God, that was the part that hadn't changed — that stubborn tilt she got right before she said something she thought would end an argument. It never had. Not with him.

"I owe you for the damage," she said instead. "Send me the estimate. That's the only business we have."

She turned to go, and Roman let the silence stretch just long enough that she'd think he was letting her win.

"Wren."

She stopped. Didn't turn around. Just a small mercy.

"You might owe the Ashfords money," he said quietly. "You don't owe them your whole life."

Her shoulders went rigid, and for one unguarded second he thought she might actually turn back around, might actually let him see whatever she was hiding behind that engagement ring and that careful, professional voice.

Instead, she got in her car and drove away without another word.

Roman stood in the parking lot long after her taillights disappeared, staring at the dent in his fender like it might explain what had just happened to the last three years of his life.

Three years ago, she'd walked away from him without an explanation.

He hadn't chased her then.

He wasn't planning on making that mistake twice.