CHAPTER THIRTY

SELENE’s POV

I almost missed her.

It was the kind of almost that lived in the margin between a glance and a look — the difference between eyes passing over something and eyes landing on it. I had been walking toward the private entrance of Arden Tower after a lunch meeting that had run twenty minutes longer than scheduled, my mind already on the three o’clock call with the Tokyo partners, when something in my peripheral vision snagged.

I kept walking, then I stopped abruptly.

Across the street, half sheltered beneath the awning of a closed boutique, Ava Bennett stood looking at the building.

She had a notebook open in her hand. And she wasn’t looking at the building the way a person looked at architecture or even the way a curious person looked at something that interested them. She was looking at it the way an investigator looked at a location.

Her pen moved, she wrote something down. Then she looked back at the building and her gaze traveled slowly upward, floor by floor, the way it did when she was mapping something rather than simply seeing it.

I knew that look, I had watched her use it a hundred times in our entire friendship years… on restaurant menus when she suspected they had overcharged us, on the faces of people she didn't trust, on the small print of contracts I had asked her to read because she caught things I missed. Ava had always looked at the world with a thoroughness that bordered on refusal. It was one of the things I had loved most about her.

And right now it was pointed directly at my building.

"Miss Arden?" Marcus said quietly beside me.

I couldn't answer immediately because Ava had stopped writing and her gaze had reached the upper floors, the penthouse level and she was standing very still now with the pen resting against the notebook and her face tilted upward.

There is something about the angle of it, the specific quality of the stillness, reach past every layer of Selene Arden I had spent four years assembling and grabbed much further in.

Ava looked tired, not the ordinary tiredness of someone who had slept badly. The deeper kind. The kind that settled into a person's posture and the lines around their eyes after years of carrying a heavy burden without being able to put it down.

I recognized that tiredness because I had worn it myself. I had looked at it in mirrors during the worst months of recovery abroad when the grief, anger and the physical pain of reconstruction had all arrived at once and there had been nobody to absorb any of it.

Ava had been carrying hers alone for four years because of me.

My throat dried up in a way I hadn't expected and couldn't fully control.

She was here because she loved Serena. That was the beginning and the end of it. She was standing on a cold street with a notebook in her hand looking at my building because fifteen years of friendship didn't end on a bridge and she had never once accepted that it did.

Four years of being pushed out of a country, four years of dead ends, vanished sources and a life dismantled around her, and Ava Bennett was still here. Still looking, still carrying the notebook with the same question marks on the same page she had been trying to answer since the beginning.

I pressed my fingers briefly against the side of my hand — a habit I had developed to keep myself steadied when something threatened to surface that I wasn't ready to face —and breathed.

Across the street Ava looked back down at her notebook and wrote again. Then she looked up one final time at the building, a long look, the kind that felt less like observation and more like something she was saying without words.

Then she closed the notebook and walked away.

I watched her go until she turned the corner and disappeared.

"Miss Arden." Marcus's voice was careful. He had worked for me long enough to know when to wait and when to speak.

"Inside," I said quietly.

The lobby closed around me and I walked to the elevator and stood in it alone while it rose toward the executive floor.

My eyes were burning but I fought the tears back.

I hadn't cried since the first year after the accident, when I had cried so much and for so long that it seems my tear glands had eventually run dry and never fully refilled.

Ava was searching for Selene Arden because she had stood beside me in a gallery and felt what I felt and had not been able to leave it alone. Because that was exactly who she was. I knew she wasn't looking into Selene Arden as a threat.

She was looking into my background because somewhere underneath everything Selene Arden had been built to be, Ava Bennett's instincts were reaching for Serena Vale.

And almost finding me.

The elevator doors opened. I walked to my office and closed the door behind me and stood in its quietness for a moment with my back against the wood.

Ava had spent four years trying to get justice for someone she refused to believe was dead.

And she had lost everything in the process… her job, her home, her footing in a city she had lived in her whole life.

I walked slowly to the desk and sat down. Clara had left the afternoon schedule neatly arranged in front of me. I looked at it without reading it.

What I wanted, with an intensity that frightened me slightly, was to cross that street and catch up with Ava before she reached the corner and say her name. Just her name, the way I had said it over thousands of times before, and watch her turn around.

I wanted to tell her I was sorry for everything she had been through. I wanted to tell her that the four years she had spent carrying this alone while I rebuilt myself abroad had not been invisible to me. That I knew what it had cost her and that it had never stopped mattering.

I wanted to sit across from her with two cups of tea and be Serena again for one hour.

Just one hour.

But I couldn't do any of those things. Not before I understood the full shape of what had been done and who had done it and whether telling Ava the truth would protect her or put her in the path of the same people who had already pushed her out of a country once.

That was the other truth I had been sitting with since spotting her on the street.

Ava investigating Selene Arden meant Ava was visible. It meant she was still moving, asking questions, leaving footprints that could be followed by more than just my security team.

Victor Hale was dead. Martin Reeves had vanished. The people protecting this conspiracy had already demonstrated they were willing to remove anyone who got close enough to matter.

Now, Ava was getting close again, and I was the only person who knew exactly how dangerous that was.

I dialed Clara's line.

"Flag any further activity connected to Ava Bennett," I said as soon as she answered. "I want to know everywhere she goes and everyone she speaks to."

I need to keep Ava safe because somewhere out there, the same people who had arranged a car accident on a bridge four years ago were still watching. And Ava walking openly toward the truth was exactly the kind of problem they had already shown they knew how to solve.

Whatever the cost may be, I was not going to sit and let that happen.