Chapter five

Zara’s Pov

I let the silence sit.

First rule: never fill silence defensively. Silence was neutral ground and whoever moved first gave something away. So I let his words hang in the amber light and kept my face smooth and gave him absolutely nothing.

Then Pinky smiled.

Slow. Unbothered. The kind of smile that said I’ve heard more interesting things.

“Most clients think that too,” I said. “By the end they realize they’re exactly like everyone else.”

Something shifted in his jaw. No offense. Interest.

“Is that what you tell yourself about them?”

“It’s what I know,” I said.

And moved.

I kept the pace slow because slow was in control.

Every step is deliberate. Every shift of weight is intentional. The music from the main floor was just enough to move to without being directed by it. Pinky didn’t follow music, she used it.

I kept my eyes on him.

That was the battlefield. Eye contact held long enough made most men look away first. I had refined it into something close to an art.

He didn’t look away.

He watched the way he did everything patient, unblinking, less like attraction and more like documentation. Building something in his mind. Taking accurate measurements.

He’s not watching Pinky. He’s watching for something underneath her.

I turned. Recalibrated. Keep moving.

I moved closer on the second pass. My fingers grazed the back of his chair as I passed light, deliberate and felt him go very still beneath the almost-contact.

Good.

I stepped back. Withdraw. Made him aware of the absence.

His glass had stopped halfway to his mouth.

I let Pinky’s mouth curve and moved in again, slower, letting the approach do the work

And became suddenly, acutely aware of how close I was.

The details arrived without permission. The angle of his jaw in the amber light. The way his shoulders sat squared, still, controlled in that particular way that had always meant he was paying complete attention. The faint scent of him was different from five years ago and somehow worse for it because it was familiar enough to unlock something I had nailed shut.

Don’t, I told myself.

I noticed anyway.

Hated that I noticed.

Keep moving anyway.

“Can I see your face?”

Quiet. No flirtation. No softness. Just a calm, direct request that landed like a hand pressed flat against my chest.

Everything inside me detonated.

My pulse spiked so hard I felt it in my throat. A cold flash moved through me from my sternum outward, the particular cold of exposure, of a door being tested from the outside. For one fractured second I was sixteen years old sitting across a dinner table memorizing a face I had no business memorizing, and then I was here, and both versions of me were equally terrified.

He knows. He

I pulled back. One step. Let my hair fall across my cheek and tilted my head like the question entertained me.

“You are seeing my face,” Pinky said.

“Your whole face.”

I let my eyes move over him slowly deliberately, the way Pinky assessed everything, turning it into power rather than panic. “Would seeing more really help you focus?” I said. “Because from here it looks like focus isn’t your problem.”

A beat.

The corner of his mouth shifted. Something close to appreciation.

“You’re good at that,” he said. “Turning the question back.”

“I’m good at a lot of things,” I said. “That’s also what you paid for.”

I moved past him again, closer this time, let my fingers trail briefly across his shoulder as I passed feather light, there and gone and felt the tension that moved through him at the contact like a current finding wire.

Good,Pinky thought.

Dangerous, Zara thought.

Both of them were right.

“You laugh differently than she does.”

I stopped.

Half a second. Barely perceptible. But I stopped and I felt a memory detonating behind my eyes without permission. Adrian at seventeen, laughing on our porch steps, turning to look at me with those same dark eyes that were currently taking me apart piece by piece. The boy I had spent two years quietly, privately ruined over before I learned to bury it somewhere it couldn’t embarrass me.

That boy was gone.

This man had replaced him.

And this man was watching me like he was already halfway to an answer I could not let him reach.

“She?” Pinky said. Carefully.

“Someone I know.” Conversational. Unhurried. “You remind me of her. I keep trying to figure out why.”

“Maybe you have a type.”

“Maybe.” His eyes moved across my face. “Or maybe it’s something I already know and can’t name yet.”

The air thinned.

I turned back toward him with Pinky’s expression in place mildly entertained, utterly unbothered and found he had leaned forward in the chair, elbows on knees, reducing the distance without moving his feet.

His eyes were very still.

“Does it bother you?” I said. Pinky’s voice. Slightly challenging. “Not being able to place it?”

“Not yet,” he said. “I’m patient.”

“Most men say that,” I said. “Most men aren’t.”

“I know.” A pause, precise and weighted. “I’m not most men.”

He stood.

Slow. Unhurried. Just a man deciding the current arrangement no longer worked for him.

He didn’t step forward. I didn't need to. The standing alone compressed the room, his height, his stillness, the particular gravity of someone who was used to occupying space with intention.

I held my ground because Pinky held her ground.

But I was aware of every inch between us in a way that had nothing to do with professional distance and everything to do with the fact that the warm, careful pull I had spent years pressing flat was apparently not as dead as I had needed it to be.

Stop it, I told myself. This is not him. This is a client in a room and you are Pinky and none of the rest of it is real right now.

My body disagreed quietly and said nothing.

He was close enough now that the light caught the details. I had been carefully not cataloging the dark eyes that hadn’t softened once, the line of his jaw, the faint scar above his left brow that hadn’t been there five years ago and that I wanted, against all reason, to ask about.

“You control everything in here,” he said quietly. “Every movement. Every look. Every word.”

I said nothing.

“Everything except the half second when something catches you.” His eyes moved slowly across my face. “You go somewhere else. Just for a moment. Then you come back.”

My chest was very tight.

I stepped back. Made it Pinky’s withdrawal a choice, not a retreat.

“The session's almost over,” I said.

He didn’t check the time.

“I know her name,” he said, quiet and certain. “I just can’t place the rest yet.”

I reached the door. Kept my hand steady on the frame. Kept everything contained and assembled and exactly where it needed to be.

“Same time next week,” Pinky said, “if you want to keep trying.”

His voice followed me through the door.

“I won’t need that long.”