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CHAPTER 28: THE EXPULSION HEARING
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2026-08-13 12:00:00The air in the university board room was thick with the scent of old paper, polished mahogany, and the cold, institutional power of a room where decisions were made that ended careers and destroyed futures. Rain beat against the tall glass windows overlooking the quad, casting long, dark shadows across the long conference table where the board of trustees sat in a stern, silent semicircle. The chandelier above them buzzed faintly, casting a flat, unflattering light.
At the center of
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Paper Hearts # Author's Note
Hi, reader. If you made it all the way to this page, thank you. Genuinely, from the bottom of my heart — you spent your time with characters I built out of nothing but stubbornness and a laptop, and that is not a small thing to give someone. I don't take it for granted, ever. A quick note for anyone who wandered in without the warning up front: this book is adult romance, explicit, and entirely fictional. Everything in these pages — the heat, the tension, the messier feelings, all of it — exists to entertain consenting adult readers who want a story that doesn't fade to black at the good part. If that's you, welcome. You're exactly who I'm writing for. Writing romance — the steamy, unapologetic, adult kind — is genuinely the thing I love most. I love slow burns that make you yell at your screen. I love the moment two characters stop pretending they don't want each other. I love writing the tension right up until it snaps, and then writing what happens after. This genre gets dismis
Paper Hearts EPILOGUE: CANVAS OF THE FUTURE
Five years later.The mid-morning sun spilled through the high skylights of the Delacroix-Sterling Gallery in downtown Manhattan, falling in wide, clean sheets across the polished concrete floor and the white walls where the featured collection hung in careful, curated rows. The space was airy and bright — a converted warehouse in the Flatiron District with twenty-foot ceilings, exposed brick, and the kind of north light that Wren had once dreamed about in the attic of her father's estate, pressing her hand against a cold dormer window and imagining a room like this one.The gallery was called Uncaged — named for the painting that had launched Wren's career at the Columbia showcase five years ago, the one with the light breaking through the dark structural lines. That painting now hung in a private collection in Tokyo, but the name had become the gallery's mission: a space dedicated to emerging artists who had been silenced, overlooked, or told that their work didn
Paper Hearts CHAPTER 42: A NEW BEGINNING
Three months later, the first quiet snowfall of winter blanketed the brownstone streets of Brooklyn in a soft, muffling white that turned the fire escapes into lace and the streetlamps into halos. The city, which never truly went silent, grew hushed and tender under the snow — the sirens distant, the traffic slowed, the endless hum of eight million lives softened to a whisper.Inside the apartment, a warm fire crackled in the hearth they had finally gotten fixed in November, casting a soft, golden glow across the hardwood floors and the fresh nursery set up in the corner of the living room. The nursery was small — a corner, really, partitioned by a bookshelf and a curtain of soft muslin — but Wren had painted the wall behind the crib herself, a mural of climbing ivy and morning glories reaching toward a painted sun that glowed faintly in the firelight. It was the greenhouse, translated into paint — the Victorian conservatory where Kai had proposed, where he had first seen h
Paper Hearts CHAPTER 41: THE SHOWCASE
The Columbia Alumni Center hummed with energy as warm light poured from the high arched windows into the autumn evening. Inside, students, faculty, and city patrons filled the main gallery room, circulating among the displays of student art and law school research projects, their voices blending into a pleasant, ambient murmur that rose and fell like a tide against the marble walls.Wren stood near her large canvas — the cobalt-and-gold piece she had been working on since the first week of the semester — a small, composed smile on her face as she spoke with an art professor from the graduate panel. The painting behind her was a study in contradiction: deep, structural lines of black and charcoal, fractured and breaking apart, while light — real, golden, insistent light — poured through the cracks in sweeping, luminous strokes. She had titled it "Uncaged." The professor was asking about her use of negative space, and Wren was answering with a quiet, confident fluency that su
Paper Hearts CHAPTER 39: FIRST DAYS
Wren's first day at Columbia was a Tuesday in September, and the city was still summer-hot, the asphalt shimmering with trapped heat, the subway stations smelling of iron and old rain. She climbed the steps from the 1 train at 116th Street with her portfolio bag slung over one shoulder and her hand resting over the swell of her belly, which had grown enough in the last month that loose shirts could no longer fully disguise it. She wore a simple white linen dress — her own choice, bought with money she had earned selling two small charcoal studies to a gallery in DUMBO — and her engagement ring caught the morning light as she pushed through the heavy glass doors of the Dodge Building.The studio space assigned to first-year MFA candidates was a vast, open room with twenty-foot ceilings, paint-splattered concrete floors, and enormous north-facing windows that poured in cold, clean light. Half a dozen students were already at work — setting up easels, unboxing supplies, exchan
Paper Hearts CHAPTER 40: TRENT'S SPIRAL
The rain in upper Manhattan was slick and cold, coating the neon signs of the late-night diners in a smeared, greasy red light that turned the gutters into mirrors and made every reflection look like a wound.Inside a dimly lit corner booth of a twenty-four-hour diner three blocks from Columbia's campus, Trent Bellamy sat staring into a lukewarm cup of black coffee that he had not touched in forty minutes. His hair was greasy, pushed back from his forehead with the flat of his hand and staying there only because it was too dirty to move. His designer coat — once a pristine charcoal wool that had cost more than most people's rent — was stained at the cuffs, the collar turned up, the silk lining torn at the left shoulder where he had caught it on a chain-link fence climbing over a lot in Newark two nights ago. His hands shook so violently that the ceramic mug rattled against its saucer every time he lifted it, and when he set it down, the coffee sloshed over the rim and poole
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