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Scarlett's POV I was afraid that distance would undo something that was still being built. Those two days away, in open territory, with someone uncomplicated and warm and present, would give Dominic enough room to remember all the reasons that choosing me required more than choosing someone else. The prophecy and the first life, alongside the fact that I had once poured poison into his whiskey with my own hands and watched him drink it.Liana had never done anything like that to anyone.The access door opened behind me.I did not turn around. I assumed it was Luca and I was already arranging what I planned to say to him, which was very little."You are not easy to find," Cain said. "Fortunately, I have been finding difficult things for a long time."I turned then. He was standing in the doorway in his dark coat, looking out at the ground like he was reading them like a book. He came and sat beside me on the ledge uninvited, and he was so close to me that his shoulder was a few inche
Scarlett's POVI fastened my apron back on and walked into the clubhouse like nothing had just happened. Of course, what else should a woman like me have done? A woman with no choice but to walk back in, pick up the cloth, wipe the glasses, smile at the smiles directed at me, and pretend I had not just stood in the doorway watching a woman gather files from my chair and tell Dominic she would see him before they finally left.That's even by the way. The music had not changed from what it was playing when I stepped out, plus the crowd was the same, alongside the smoke and the smell of spilled whiskey which were still there. Besides, I had expected something to be different if at all, but everything was exactly as I left it, and that was the most disorienting part of all.Demi ran her eyes over me when I came behind the bar. She did not ask me anything. She only handed me a damp cloth and went back to what she was doing. I loved the gesture, and I loved her for it in that quiet moment
Scarlett's POV The hallway was quieter here, the muffled bass of the clubhouse music becoming something distant and untextured the further I moved from it. I took the stairs and turned toward the corridor that led to Dominic's study, my pace unhurried and my face arranged.The study door was closed.Not slightly open. Not fully open. Closed, which according to the system I had quietly established over weeks of reading this door meant a meeting was in progress.At this hour.I stood in front of it for a moment.There was a voice on the other side. Dominic's, low and measured, the cadence of someone in the middle of explaining something. And then another voice, responding to him. Lighter. A woman's.I knew that voice.I knew it from a sunlit outdoor lounge and a first introduction with a hand extended and a smile that had been directed entirely at Dominic and not at the other person standing directly beside him.I pushed the door open.Liana looked up first. She was seated in the chair
Scarlett's POV.The clubhouse on a Thursday night had its own particular rhythm.Not as loud as the weekends, not as sparse as a Tuesday. Thursday sat comfortably in the middle — enough people to keep the energy alive, few enough that you could actually hear the person across the bar without leaning in. The music was lower than usual tonight, one of the bartenders having turned it down an increment when no one was looking, and nobody had turned it back up yet which meant either nobody had noticed or nobody cared.I noticed. I cared about very little of it.I moved through the familiar motions behind the bar with the kind of efficiency that came from doing something enough times that your hands knew the steps before your mind gave the instruction. Glasses pulled, drinks poured, bottles returned to the shelf in the right order. I had done this so many times the choreography had become automatic, which was convenient on nights when my head was somewhere else entirely.Tonight my head was
Luca's POV "You took it for granted," she said plainly. "You had all of that from her and you treated it like background noise. You came to me instead because I wasn't chasing you and that made me interested." She stopped, and something in her expression shifted — not softened, but changed, like the anger had moved and revealed something underneath it. "And now look at us." I said nothing. "She stopped chasing," Zara said. "The moment Scarlett stopped turning her whole life toward you, you noticed her. And now I'm the one calling eleven times and counting. Now I'm the one adjusting my schedule and rearranging my day and trying to figure out how to hold your attention for longer than a conversation." She held my gaze. "I became her, Luca. And you became you." The room was quiet for a moment. I wanted to tell her she was wrong. I had the words arranged and ready, the reasonable explanation that reframed everything she had just said in a way that made it less accurate, or at least
Luca's POV.I heard her before I saw her.The sound of her door pulling open with more force than necessary was the first signal. The second was the particular quality of her footsteps — heels on the floor, deliberate and precise, the kind of steps that were not walking toward something so much as making a statement about it. I had known Zara long enough to read the full paragraph of her mood from the sound of her entering a room.She was not happy.I turned from the window where I had been standing for the better part of fifteen minutes doing nothing particularly productive. She stopped in the middle of the room, arms folded, eyes on me with an expression that had moved well past irritation and settled somewhere closer to a feeling she had been sitting with for a while and had finally decided to stop sitting with."You didn't come last night," she said."I know." I turned back to the window for a brief moment. "I had things on my mind. I wasn't in good company.""That's not the point







