Chapter 2: Floor 27

(Keyla POV)

The door opened before I could decide whether to knock.
Draxler Churchill stood in the frame, jacket off, sleeves rolled to the elbow, a glass of whiskey in one hand that he hadn’t touched recently enough for the ice to melt. He looked at me the way people look at things they were half-expecting — not surprised, just confirming.

I took a step back. The heel of my shoe caught the carpet.
“Wrong floor,” I said.

He didn’t move. His eyes moved from my bare hand to the torn edge of my veil, then finally to my face. It didn’t feel like scanning. It felt like cataloguing the damage.

“The elevator’s behind you,” he said. His voice was low, quiet in the way a room gets quiet when something’s about to be decided.

“I know where the elevator is.” I held up the keycard. “I grabbed this by accident. I’ll go.”

He looked at the keycard. Something moved across his face that I couldn’t read, and he didn’t reach for it.

“Keyla.”

Just my name. He looked at me once and seemed to understand more than I wanted him to.

In the two years I’d been with Adrian, I’d met Draxler only four times — across family dinners and one Churchill company event where I’d been brought along like a prop. Unkind was never the word for him, but neither was welcoming, which at the time I’d taken as arrogance. Now I wasn’t sure what it was.

“Don’t ask me anything,” I said.

Instead, he stepped back from the door and left it open.

I knew I shouldn’t have gone in, but the corridor was exposed — camera dome at each end, anyone from the family could come up at any second — and my dress was white and enormous, about as subtle as a headline. The alternative was standing in a Churchill hotel hallway looking exactly like what I was: a bride who’d just seen something she couldn’t unsee.

The suite was quieter than the corridor. Darker, too — one lamp on, his jacket over the back of a chair, a folder of documents on the table that he’d clearly been working through before I arrived. The whiskey glass sat on the edge of a side table, the ice still intact. Untouched since he’d poured it.

I stopped near the door and didn’t go further.

“Bathroom,” I said. “Two minutes. I need to fix my face before I go back downstairs.”

He gestured toward the hallway on his left without a word.

I went in, closed the door, and looked at myself in the mirror under the bathroom lights. Mascara still intact, which was almost funny. I looked completely fine on the surface. Dress perfect, hair still pinned, veil just slightly wrecked at the edge where it had caught. Nobody downstairs would know anything was wrong if I walked back in there right now and smiled.

That thought made me feel sick.

My phone started going off in my hand. Adrian’s name came first, three times in a row, followed by the wedding coordinator: Keyla, guests are seated, we need you at the top of the stairs in ten minutes. My mother was next: Sweetheart, is everything alright? Your father is asking.

I stared at the screen.

Then one more message, different number. Unknown. The kind of format that looked internal — no name, just a string of digits that didn’t belong to any contact.

If you go downstairs, they will blame you first.

I read it twice. Then I walked back out of the bathroom.

Draxler was standing near the window, not looking at me. His cufflinks caught the low light — black, simple, a small D engraved on each one. He turned when he heard me come back in.

I held out my phone. “Someone just sent me this.”

He looked at the screen. His expression didn’t change much, but something in his posture did — a small, precise stillness, like a person who recognizes something they weren’t expecting to see in someone else’s hand.

“Don’t answer it,” he said.

“Do you know who—”

“Don’t answer it.” He handed the phone back. His fingers didn’t touch mine. “And don’t go downstairs yet.”

“I have to. The ceremony—”

“Is not happening.” He said it simply, like it was already fact. Like he’d known it before I had. “Not tonight.”

I looked at him. He was watching me with that same unreadable expression, calm in a way that didn’t feel like peace — more like someone who’d already run the calculations and was waiting for everyone else to catch up. It made me want to ask how long he’d known about Adrian and Vivienne. It made me not want to know the answer.

“I’m not staying here,” I said.

“I know.”

“And I’m not going to—”

“I’m not asking you to do anything.” He picked up his whiskey, finally, and took a short drink. Set it back down. “I’m telling you that if you walk out of this building right now, in that dress, with no ring and a half-torn veil, the story they build around you will follow you for years. That’s not a threat. That’s just how this family works.”

My hands were shaking. I noticed them finally, now that he’d said it out loud — the thing I’d been holding back since the moment I walked out of Adrian’s suite.

“So what am I supposed to do,” I said, though the question wasn’t really for him. Maybe it wasn’t for anyone.

Draxler set the glass down and looked at me for a long moment.

“If you want revenge,” he said, “don’t go back downstairs as his bride.”

“What does that mean?”

He reached past me and pushed the suite door open wider, leaving space between us while making the choice impossible to ignore.

“Stay,” he said.

The word hung between us like smoke. Thick and heavy. I should’ve walked out right then. Instead I let the door click shut behind me.

Draxler didn’t move closer, but the air between us suddenly felt smaller. Without the jacket, he seemed taller than I remembered, broader through the shoulders, the rolled sleeves exposing forearms corded with restraint. His eyes trace traced the line of my neck, the rapid rise and fall of my chest under all that white silk, then back up to my mouth.

My pulse hammered so hard I could feel it in my throat. This was wrong. This was Adrian’s older brother. The one who always looked at me like I was temporary. And yet here I was, still in my wedding dress, veil torn, heart shredded, standing in his suite while the man I was supposed to marry waited downstairs with his mistress.

“You’re shaking,” he said quietly. Not a question.

I looked down at my hands. “I’m angry.”

“Good.” The corner of his mouth twitched, not quite a smile. Something darker. “Stay angry.”

Wrong didn’t even begin to cover it. Draxler was Adrian’s older brother, the one who had always looked at me like I was temporary. I didn’t. My back hit the wall beside the door before I realized I’d been moving backward. Draxler stopped just inches away, close enough that I could smell the whiskey on his breath and the faint, expensive scent of his cologne—something woody and sharp that made my stomach tighten.

His hand lifted, hesitated, then brushed a loose strand of hair from my cheek. The touch was barely there, but it burned. Calloused fingertips against my skin, warm and steady while everything inside me felt like it was fracturing. I hated how good it felt. How desperately I wanted more of it.

“Don’t,” I whispered, even as I leaned into his hand.

His thumb traced my lower lip, slow, like he was memorizing the shape. “Tell me to stop and I will.”

I didn’t tell him to stop.

Instead I grabbed the front of his shirt, fingers curling into the crisp fabric, pulling him closer. Our mouths crashed together—messy, desperate, nothing like the careful kisses I’d shared with Adrian. Draxler kissed like a man who’d been waiting for permission he never expected to get. One hand slid into my hair, gripping just hard enough to tilt my head back. The other pressed against my waist, bunching the layers of silk, anchoring me against him.

I gasped into his mouth when I felt how hard he already was, the thick line of him pressing against my stomach through his trousers. Heat flooded between my legs, sharp and sudden, shame twisting right alongside the want. This was revenge and grief and need all tangled together, ugly and honest.

He broke the kiss only to drag his mouth down my neck, teeth grazing the sensitive spot just below my ear. A low sound escaped me—half moan, half sob. His hand moved lower, palm sliding over the curve of my ass, pulling me tighter against him.

“Keyla,” he breathed against my skin, voice rough, almost broken. “You have no fucking idea what you’re doing to me right now.”

I could feel the control he was fighting for—the way his fingers trembled slightly where they gripped me, the way his breath hitched when I rolled my hips against him experimentally. My hands moved on their own, sliding under his shirt, nails dragging over warm skin and tight muscle. He shuddered.

We were still fully dressed. My ridiculous wedding gown crushed between us, his shirt half-unbuttoned now from my frantic fingers. But it already felt more intimate than anything I’d ever done with Adrian. Dangerous. Addictive.

Draxler pulled back just enough to look at me, eyes dark, pupils blown wide. His thumb wiped a tear I didn’t realize had fallen from my cheek.

“You can still walk away,” he said, voice low and strained. “Say the word.”

I stared at him—chest heaving, lips swollen, the careful mask he always wore completely shattered. For the first time, I saw the hunger he’d been hiding behind all that cold control.

I didn’t say the word.

Instead I kissed him again, harder this time, and felt the last thread of his restraint snap.