CHAPTER SIX — Two A.M.

I woke at two in the morning to light bleeding under my bedroom door, thin and gold, and the particular quiet of a very large apartment that meant only one other person was awake.

I found Damien in his study, sleeves rolled, tie gone, a spreadsheet open he wasn't really looking at. He looked up, and something in his face — tired in a way the boardroom never allowed — made him look younger than thirty-four.

"Couldn't sleep?" I asked.

"I don't sleep much. Never have." He said it like weather, not confession.

"That sounds exhausting."

"It's efficient." The same word I'd used to describe my own life, weeks ago. He seemed to hear the echo the same moment I did. "You're up too."

"Bad habit. My father worked nights before the stroke. I'd wait up to make sure he got home okay." I stepped further in, drawn by the rare unguarded quality of him at three a.m., undefended. "Can I ask you something?"

"You can ask."

"Vaughn said Cole men don't forgive people who make them look like fools. Is that your grandfather talking, or you?"

Damien turned a pen over in his fingers for a long moment. Then he set it down. "My grandfather came home from a war with nothing and a conviction that softness was how men lost everything. My father inherited the company and none of the discipline — he drank, he gambled, he let people close who only wanted what he had. I was twenty-four when he died. I chose the version of myself that meant nobody could get close enough to cost me what he lost." He looked at me. "So. Both, I suppose. Him, through me."

"That sounds lonely."

"It's efficient," he said again, softer, like even he didn't believe it anymore.

"Those aren't the same thing," I said. "You keep using one word to excuse the other."

He looked at me a long moment, deciding something. "You're the first person who's said that to me in ten years."

"Maybe you stopped letting people close enough to say it."

"Maybe I did." He closed the laptop. "Why did you really say yes, Ivy? The money's obvious. But you could have found another way, eventually."

I thought about lying. Instead: "Because you didn't ask me to be grateful. You laid out terms and let me negotiate them as if I mattered as much as the contract. Most people in my life have needed me smaller, easier. You just asked me to be honest."

Something shifted in his face, and this time it didn't fade back into composure. He reached across the distance and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, careful in a way that had nothing to do with contracts or cameras.

"I didn't expect you," he said quietly. "Whatever this started as — I didn't expect you."

"I didn't expect you either," I admitted, and meant it more than almost anything I'd said in months.

Neither of us moved for a long moment, the space between us charged with something the contract had never accounted for.

Then his phone buzzed, harsh in the quiet, and we both startled back into who we were supposed to be.

"Sofia," he said, glancing at the screen, voice returning to its careful register. "Vaughn's been asking questions at the courthouse about our marriage license filing."

The warmth in the room went cold instantly.

"Already?" I asked.

"Already." He was already reaching for his laptop, the CEO settling back over him like armour. "Go back to bed, Ivy. I'll handle this."

I didn't move right away, watching him disappear back into the version of himself that handled things alone. "Damien," I said, from the doorway. He looked up. "You don't have to handle it alone. Not anymore. That's not in the contract, but I'm telling you anyway."

He didn't answer, but he didn't look away either, and I left him there with something new sitting unspoken between us — not quite a promise, but the shape of one.