Chapter 4

Nadia’s POV:

The driver stopped in front of the hotel. It was a high-end hotel.

“I have a reservation,” I told the man at the front desk. My voice was a bit scratchy. “Under Nadia Voss.”

Nadia Voss. I had not used my last name out loud in three years. I had been Nadia Hargrove since the wedding. The small warmth I felt hearing it surprised me.

The man at the desk gave me a key card and directed me to the top floor. I took the elevator up alone, my suitcase at my feet, and watched the numbers climb.

The suite was beautiful.

Gold lamps on the side tables. A bed wide enough to sleep three people across. Floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the park, the city lights soft and distant below. Everything in the room was clean and completely quiet. No sound of Vivienne's heels on marble. No Dorian sighing from behind his phone.

Just me.

I locked the door and leaned against it with my back and let myself breathe.

I crossed to the bed and sat on the edge of it. The mattress was soft.

I picked up my phone.

There was only one person I wanted to talk to.

Mara picked up on the second ring. She always picked up on the second ring, day or night, which was one of approximately a thousand reasons she was my best friend.

“Nadia? Is everything okay? Did that witch finally turn you into a frog? I haven’t seen you in forever.”

I laughed, but it came out wrong… almost like a sob, like the laugh and the cry had been waiting behind the same door and both of them pushed through at once.

“Mara…” I pressed my hand over my eyes. “It's over. Dorian and I... we're getting a divorce. I'm currently at a hotel.”

The line went silent for a half second and then:

“What?” Mara's voice went up so fast and so loud I had to move the phone away from my ear. “What do you mean it's over and you’re getting a divorce? What's going on?”

I didn't say anything. I was pressing my lips together, trying to decide where to start, how to put the whole evening into words.

“Nadia, talk to me! Tell me exactly what happened. Don't leave out any of the juicy parts. Tell me where you are, I will come over there right now and we can go burn their house down. I swear to God.”

Despite everything, that made me smile. Only Mara could make me smile while crying.

“No, don't come yet, I need to be alone for a while.” I said, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand. “It’s that girl, Lena. Dorian left me for her. I mean I saw this coming but it still hurts. You were right, I shouldn’t have married him so quickly. I was so stupid to love a loser like that.”

“That little rat!” Mara screamed. “I always knew he was a mama's boy, but i thought he loved you. Who does he think he is? He’s not even that handsome! With that weak chin of his. I knew I should have objected on your wedding day.”

I let out a long, tired breath and lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling.

“It gets worse,” I said.

The line went quiet again. It felt as if Mara knew, when I said those words, to stop talking and listen.

“Vivienne actually offered me a check to leave her son. She told me to take it and get out of her son’s life forever.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line. I thought maybe the call dropped.

“Mara? Are you there?” I asked.

“I'm here,” Mara said. Her voice was very low now. “She tried to buy you like a piece of furniture. That... that disgusting, old, wrinkled hag. And what did Dorian do? Don’t tell me he said nothing to his mother.”

I closed my eyes.

“No,” I whispered. “He said 'maybe it’s for the best. He told me he doesn't love me anymore. He said he loved someone else. He basically admitted it was Lena. He stood there and watched his mother treat me like trash, Mara. I couldn’t believe how I ended up with a coward like him.”

“I am going to kill him,” Mara said. “I am going to find him and I am going to kick him where it hurts until he cries for his mommy. How could he do that to you? You gave up everything for that jerk! you stopped working your assistant designer job because they said it was 'low class.' You changed your whole life for that man!”

My throat tightened.

“I know,” I said. My heart felt heavy. “But Mara... I took it. I took the money.”

The silence this time had a completely different texture. Mara was still there… I could hear her breathing but she wasn't saying anything. She was processing what I just said.

“You took the money?” she asked. Her voice was stunned. “Nadia... you actually took the money and signed the papers?”

“I did,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “I realized that I was never going to win if I stayed. If I took the money, at least I would have a chance to start over.”

There was another brief pause.

“Wow,” Mara said. She sounded like she was still processing it. “Nadia... I am furious for you. I am so mad I could throw my TV out the window. But…” She paused for a second. I could almost hear her thinking. “I know you, Nadia. We’ve been friends since we were five years old. I know how your brain works. You don't just walk away when people hurt you. You aren't the kind of girl who just takes the money and disappears into the sunset to live a quiet life. You’re quiet, but you’re like a volcano.”

I sat up slightly.

“What are you saying, Mara?” I asked, letting out a nervous laugh.

“I'm saying,” Mara said, her voice getting a bit lower. “That I know you probably have that look in your eyes right now. I can't see you, but I know it's there. You accepted that money, but you aren't done with the Hargroves, are you? You’re going to do something terrible, aren't you? You’re planning to make them regret the day they ever met you.”

I sat up fully. My spine straightened.

A smile touched the corner of my mouth. The first real one all night.

“Of course I'm going to get my revenge, Mara. I'm going to get my revenge on both of them. Vivienne think she bought her way out of a problem, but she actually just funded the person who is going to destroy her. I'm going to take everything from them. Their name, their pride, their money. All of it. I have a plan, Mara. It already started to grow in my head on my way to this hotel.”

“I knew it!” Mara cheered. “That's my girl! I’m not going to ask you to tell me the plan because I know you’re not gonna say anything. Listen I’m not saying I fully support you but I know that they deserve whatever you want to do. But I just need you to be careful.”

“I know what I’m doing, don’t worry I’m not going to kill anyone.” I said, rubbing my temples. The headache had moved from the back of my skull to somewhere behind my eyes. “My head hurts too much. I've been through too much tonight. For now, I just need a very strong drink. I need to drown the sorrows of this marriage before I can start the war.”

“Okay, okay,” Mara said. “Go get a drink. But make sure you call me tomorrow morning.”

“I will,” I said. “Goodnight, Mara. And thank you for being on my side.”

“Always, Nadia. Always.”

The call ended.

I sat on the edge of the expensive hotel bed in my hoodie and sweatpants and I held the phone in my lap for a moment. The room was still quiet. The park lights were still reflecting through the windows.

I did feel a little better. But the anger was still there, running just under the surface of everything. Having Mara on my side made me feel like I wasn't alone.

I looked at the mini-bar tucked into the cabinet by the wardrobe. I could see the small bottles lined up behind the glass door.

I needed something stronger than what they had in a mini-bar.

~~~

The basement level of the hotel had a club called The Vault.

I had seen the sign for it on the way up. I changed my shoes, ran my fingers through my hair once without caring what it looked like, and went down.

The club was everything the suite wasn't.

Dark and loud and alive. I could feel the music in my bones.

The bar ran along the left wall. I found a stool and sat down and the bartender was there almost immediately… he was a young guy with tattoos curling up his forearms.

He looked at me and I looked back at him.

“Double whiskey,” I said.

He poured it without commentary. I appreciated that enormously.

I drank it. I ordered another. Then I looked at the row of tequila behind him.

“Make it three,” I told him.

He poured three shots in a row without asking a single question. He was an excellent bartender.

I worked through them steadily. The whiskey was hot going down and then warm in my chest. The tequila burned in a different way. I wasn't trying to forget. I understood, even through the fog of it, that what happened in that library was not something I was going to process into oblivion tonight. I was just trying to turn the volume down enough to function.

The club moved around me. People dancing in pairs and groups, bodies finding the rhythm of the music the way water found the shape of whatever held it. Someone laughed nearby at something I couldn't hear. Nobody in this room cared about legacy or last names or whether your hair extensions were thick enough to be presentable.

I ordered one more drink and turned sideways on my stool to watch the crowd. The alcohol had reached the stage where things were a bit blurry. I was aware that I was drunk. I was also aware that I didn't particularly mind.

That was when I felt it.

The warmth at the back of my neck. The particular awareness of being watched… not the anxious kind, not the kind that made you want to check the exits. This was something different. It felt more like being noticed than being observed.

I turned my head slowly, keeping my glass in my hand.

He was in a booth across the bar.

Leaning back against the seat with a glass of something dark resting on the table in front of him, entirely relaxed. He was wearing a dark button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up past his forearms, no suit, no tie. His hair was dark and a little unkempt, like he had run his hand through it at some point in the evening and hadn't given it further thought. His eyes, even across the distance of the bar and the dim lighting, were a very clear blue.

He didn't look like he belonged in New York.

That was the first thing I registered. Every man I had spent the last three years around wore the city the way they wore their suits… as an identity, a signal of everything they wanted you to understand about them before they spoke. This man had none of that. He looked solid.

He was watching me. And when I caught him at it, he didn't look away.

He held my gaze steadily. Then he picked up his glass and raised it just slightly.

I knew I was drunk. I knew the responsible, sensible, Hargrove-approved version of me would have turned back to the bar and asked for water and gone upstairs to sleep. But that version of me had signed divorce papers and left her wedding ring on a nightstand. That version of me was gone.

The woman sitting at this bar had nothing left to lose and nothing left to perform for.

I looked at the man across the room.

I gave him a slow, lazy smile. And then I winked.

I watched his eyebrows rise just slightly. He was clearly surprised. He set his glass down and began to stand.

I turned back to the bar. My heart was beating faster now, and it wasn't from the whiskey. I picked up my drink and took a slow sip and kept my eyes forward.

I was being reckless. I knew that. The rational part of my brain was still functional enough to register it. But recklessness felt like the first real choice I had made for myself in three years.

And somewhere underneath everything else, was the thought: Dorian would absolutely hate this.

That made it perfect.