THE BRIDAL SUITE LOCKOUT

She had said yes.

Luna remembered almost nothing of the actual word leaving her mouth — only the roar of relief that had swept through six hundred guests when it did, the priest's booming pronouncement, the eruption of applause that had rattled the stained glass in its two-hundred-year-old frames, Ethan's hand tightening around hers as he'd bent to kiss her a second time, chaste and photographable, nothing like the terrace. She remembered her father weeping openly in the front pew, unashamed for the first time since his accident. She remembered Aria's hand pressed to her own mouth, sobbing happily into Freya's shoulder. She remembered, distantly, the anonymous text still glowing somewhere in the folds of her gown like a coal she hadn't found the nerve to look at again.

She did not remember, until the black car pulled beneath the private entrance of Vance Tower's residential floors well past midnight, exactly how she'd gotten from the altar to here — stripped of six hundred witnesses, alone with her husband in an elevator climbing sixty stories in absolute, ringing silence.

The penthouse doors opened onto darkness and starlight.

Ethan's home occupied the entire top floor of Vance Tower, a vast, glass-walled expanse of pale stone and dark wood that seemed to hover above the city rather than sit atop it, floor-to-ceiling windows on every side turning the skyline into a private cathedral of its own — a hundred thousand lights scattered beneath them like something spilled and never cleaned up, the distant black ribbon of the harbor threaded through it all, ships' running lights blinking red and green in patient, silent rows. The air inside smelled of cedar and cold stone, faintly of the white orchids someone had arranged in a vase on the entry table — a wedding gift, Luna guessed, from someone hoping to please a man who did not look, standing in the doorway of his own home with his jacket already discarded and his bow tie hanging loose around an unbuttoned collar, like a man capable of being pleased by anything at all tonight.

"There's a guest suite down the east hall," Ethan said, not looking at her, moving instead toward the bar cart tucked into an alcove near the windows. "Freya had your things sent up this afternoon. Bathroom's stocked, towels are in the—"

"Ethan."

He didn't stop pouring the scotch, but his shoulders went very still.

"We're married," Luna said, the word strange and heavy in her own mouth, still faintly disbelieving. "I think we're past the point of pretending I need directions to a guest bathroom in my own home."

"It's not your home." The words came out flatter than she expected, cutting through the quiet hum of the penthouse's climate system. He set the scotch down, untouched, and finally turned to face her, and whatever softness had lived behind his eyes at the altar had folded itself away completely, replaced by the same cold, assessing composure she'd first met across his mahogany desk. "It's mine. You'll live in it for the next year because the contract requires it. That doesn't make it yours, and it doesn't make this—" he gestured, once, at the space between them, at her gown, at the rings now weighing down both their hands— "anything more than what it is."

The words landed like a slap, sharper for how gently he'd delivered them. Luna felt heat climb her throat, some tangled mess of hurt and fury she didn't have the energy, after the day she'd had, to properly untangle.

"I'm aware of what this is," she said. "I signed the contract, remember? I read clause fourteen point three in far more detail than I ever wanted to. You don't need to remind me it's business."

"I do, actually." Ethan crossed the room toward her, and the movement should have felt like retreat given the ice in his voice, but instead it felt like the opposite — a deliberate closing of distance, purposeful, almost predatory in its calm. He stopped close enough that she had to tip her chin to hold his gaze, close enough that she caught cedar and salt beneath the fading champagne on his breath, close enough that the whole vast, glittering penthouse seemed to shrink down to the narrow space between his body and hers. "Because I watched your face at the altar today, Luna. I watched it during the kiss at the gala. And I am telling you now, as clearly as I know how, so that neither of us pretends surprise later — do not fall in love with me."

The bluntness of it stole her breath more thoroughly than any tenderness could have.

"That's — arrogant, even for you," Luna managed, though her voice had lost some of its earlier steel.

"It's a mercy," Ethan said, quieter now, something moving behind his eyes that looked, for one unguarded second, less like arrogance and more like an old, well-worn wound he kept carefully bandaged. "I am not a man who has anything left in him worth falling for. Whatever you think you saw today — at the altar, on the terrace — it was theater, Luna. Good theater. Necessary theater. But theater. In a year, this contract ends, your company's shares transfer back to your family, and we go our separate ways with nothing owed between us. That only works cleanly if neither of us confuses the performance for the thing itself."

Luna studied him for a long moment — the rigid set of his jaw, the careful distance he'd built into every word even as his body stood close enough to warm the air between them — and felt something in her chest crack quietly along a seam she hadn't known existed until just now.

"Understood," she said, and was almost proud of how level her voice came out. "I'll take the guest suite."

---

She lasted forty minutes on the guest suite's pristine, unfamiliar sheets before giving up entirely on sleep.

The suite was beautiful — pale linen walls, a bed dressed in Egyptian cotton so fine it felt like water against her skin, a private balcony overlooking the harbor's slow crawl of container ships — but it smelled of nothing, of no one, a hotel room dressed up as a home, and every time Luna closed her eyes she saw the anonymous text glowing white against black, *your husband knows who crashed your father's car,* until her heart hammered too hard to let exhaustion win.

She gave up around two in the morning, pulled a silk robe over the slip she'd changed into, and padded barefoot down the east hall toward the penthouse's main living space, telling herself she only wanted water, only wanted the quiet hum of the climate system and the distant glitter of the harbor to talk her pulse back down to something survivable.

Ethan was still awake.

He sat in the dark, unlit save for the ambient glow of the city bleeding through the windows, tie discarded entirely now, shirt unbuttoned at the collar, a tumbler of scotch — a fresh one, she noted, the first apparently abandoned untouched hours ago — resting forgotten in his hand. He didn't look up when she entered, but something in the set of his shoulders told her he'd heard her the moment she'd left the guest suite, that he'd likely tracked every step of her restless progress through his own home with the same instinctive awareness he seemed to apply to everything.

"Couldn't sleep," Luna said, when the silence stretched too long to bear.

"Neither could I." His voice, in the dark, had lost some of its earlier iron — rougher now, tired in a way she hadn't heard from him before, not even in the corridor confrontation with Silas. "Guest suite not to your liking?"

"The bed's fine. My head isn't." She crossed to the window instead of the kitchen, drawn by the view despite herself — the harbor's ships blinking their patient lights, the city's endless gold sprawl, the moon a thin silver blade hanging just above the water. "Long day."

"The longest kind." A pause, ice shifting faintly in his glass. "You should try the couch. It's closer to the windows than the guest suite. Sometimes the view helps."

She didn't answer, only moved to the low, wide couch facing the glass and curled herself into its corner, pulling a folded throw blanket across her knees, watching the ships crawl their slow paths toward the harbor mouth. She meant only to sit for a few minutes. The couch, deep and impossibly soft after a day spent laced into whalebone and silk, had other plans — and within a quarter hour, lulled by the low, ambient hum of the tower and the exhausted wreckage of the last twenty-four hours, Luna's eyes slid shut and did not open again.

---

She woke to the sensation of moving through air.

For one disoriented, floating moment, Luna thought she was still dreaming — the world tilted at an unfamiliar angle, warmth surrounding her on every side, a heartbeat thudding slow and steady against her ear where her cheek had come to rest against something solid and warm. Then her mind caught up to her body, and she understood, with a lurch that sent heat flooding straight to her face, that Ethan Vance was carrying her.

"You fell asleep on the couch," he said, voice low, pitched for the hush of the sleeping penthouse around them, his arms secure beneath her knees and shoulders, her own arms having apparently curled instinctively around his neck sometime during the transition from unconscious to half-aware. "Your neck would have hated you for it by morning."

"I can walk," Luna murmured, though she made no move to test the claim, some traitorous, exhausted part of her far too content with the solid warmth of him, the clean cedar-and-salt scent of his skin this close, the steady, unhurried rhythm of his heartbeat beneath her ear.

"I know," Ethan said, and didn't put her down.

He carried her the length of the darkened hallway, past the guest suite door standing open and cold and unused, toward a set of double doors at the hall's end that Luna understood, with a fresh spike of awareness, must lead to his own bedroom — the room she'd been so carefully, deliberately steered away from hours earlier. He nudged the door open with his shoulder, and the space beyond unfolded in shadow and pale moonlight: a bed vast enough to be its own country, dressed in dark linens, floor-to-ceiling windows on two full walls turning the entire room into an observatory suspended above the glittering city.

He laid her down with a gentleness that felt entirely at odds with every cold, guarded word he'd spoken hours earlier in the living room — settling her against pillows that smelled, unmistakably, achingly, of him, cedar and something colder beneath, ocean salt, faint traces of the sandalwood soap she imagined he must use. Her robe had loosened somewhere during the journey, silk pooling at her shoulder, and she felt entirely, dangerously bare beneath his gaze in the moonlit dark, though he'd covered no more skin than the gala's emerald gown had.

"Ethan," she breathed, some instinct warning her to sit up, to retreat, to remember every cold warning he'd delivered in the living room not four hours before — *do not fall in love with me* — even as her body, exhausted and strangely, traitorously drawn to the heat of him, refused entirely to cooperate.

He didn't step back.

He braced one hand against the mattress beside her hip instead, leaning down slowly enough that she could have moved, could have turned her face away, could have done a dozen things to stop what was happening except that she did none of them, held frozen and breathless beneath the weight of his gaze in the dark, watching his pale eyes travel from her mouth to her eyes and back again with an intensity that stole whatever protest she might have found the strength to voice. His breath, when he finally spoke, ghosted warm and close across her lips, close enough that the space between his mouth and hers had narrowed to something measured in millimeters instead of inches, close enough that her whole body had gone electric and still at once, waiting.

"We have a contract to fulfill, wife," Ethan whispered, low and rough, his voice scraped raw at the edges with something that sounded far less like cold calculation than the words themselves pretended to be. "Don't forget why you're here."