ANMELDENNadia's POVHe walked toward me.I stepped back without deciding to, one step and then another, until my back met the wall and there was nowhere left to go and Kane was standing in front of me close enough that I could smell his cologne and see the slight curve at the corner of his mouth that meant he'd noticed exactly what I'd done and found it interesting.He looked at me for a moment.Then — "do you think I want to do anything to you?"The embarrassment arrived so fast and so completely that I felt it in my face before I could do anything about it. I looked at the wall beside his shoulder, which was not a dignified response but was the only one I had available.His hands slid to my waist, easy and familiar, and I looked at him despite myself."You're still young, Nadia," he said, and patted my head once.I stared at him."Go to sleep," he said, and stepped back from me like the whole thing had been unremarkable, already reaching into his jacket pocket for his phone. "I have meeting
Nadia's POVFour days.That was how long Kane had gone without saying a single word to me directly. Not good morning, not instructions passed through Lev, not even the brief acknowledgment of existing in the same room. Just — nothing. Four days of him moving through the house like I was furniture he'd stopped noticing, and me doing the same in the opposite direction because I had my pride and I intended to keep it.So when Lev knocked on my door yesterday evening and said Kane had a gala tonight and I was going with him, I'd stared at him for long enough that he'd repeated it.I was still processing it."Hold still," the maid said, adjusting something at my waist with the focused concentration of someone who took their work seriously and had no patience for fidgeting.I held still.The dress was deep green, fitted through the bodice and flaring slightly below, the kind of dress that had clearly been selected by someone who knew what they were doing and had opinions about it. I hadn't
Kane's POVShe didn't answer.She sat across the desk and looked at him and said absolutely nothing, which was its own kind of answer, and Kane held her gaze for a moment before he stood.She stiffened immediately. He watched her hands in her lap curl into fists, her knuckles shifting, the specific tension of someone who had decided to stay still because moving felt like admitting something. She was looking at him the way she'd looked at him last night — not quite the same fear, but adjacent to it, the awareness of him in a room that had suddenly gotten smaller.He came around the desk.She didn't move. Didn't lean back, didn't shift, just sat with her hands fisted in her lap and her jaw set and her eyes tracking him with the careful attention of someone trying very hard to look like they weren't tracking him.He stopped in front of her.Reached down and placed two fingers under her chin and raised her face up until she was looking at him properly, and she let him, which told him more
Kane's POVShe knocked - quietly. He hadn't expected that. He'd told Lev to call her, not escort her, which meant she'd come on her own, which meant she'd chosen to come, and she'd still knocked, which told him something about where her head was."Come in," he said.The door opened and she stepped inside and Kane looked at her the way he looked at things he was trying to understand — starting from the bottom and working up, taking inventory without rushing it. The loose shirt, the bare feet, her hair down and slightly disheveled from sleep, the way she held herself in the doorway with one hand still on the handle like she was keeping the option of leaving available. Her eyes when they finally found his were doing something careful, something that was working very hard at being ordinary.She was failing at ordinary.He noticed.He also noticed the mark on her lip, faint now but there, and he looked at it for exactly one second before looking away."Sit down," he said.She came in and
Nadia's POVI didn't see him that night.I lay in bed for a long time after he left, staring at the ceiling, my lip still stinging, my hands eventually steadying themselves out of sheer exhaustion, and I listened to the house for the sound of him and heard nothing. No footsteps past my door. No movement in the corridor. Just the house doing what it did at night, settling into itself, and me lying in the middle of it waiting for something I couldn't name.Eventually I slept.In the morning he was still gone.I came downstairs and the dining room was empty and the study door was open and dark inside, and I stood in the hallway for a moment and looked at both and then went to the kitchen and made tea and sat at the counter and drank it alone.Lev appeared after a while, which was the closest thing to a morning routine this house had given me — Lev, appearing, coffee in hand, positioned near whatever window was closest.I looked at him. "Where is he.""Out," Lev said."Since last night?"
Nadia's POVI went upstairs because Lev told me to.Not because I wanted to, but because the way he said it left no room for anything else, and I'd learned enough about this house to know when pushing back was pointless. I'd heard enough from the top of those stairs anyway — not the words, not the specifics, but the temperature of it, the weight in Kane's voice, the kind of silence that sat between two people when something serious had already been decided.Something had happened at the office.I went to my room, picked up my book, sat against the headboard and opened it to a page I'd already read three times and stared at it without absorbing a single word. My mind kept going back to the stairs, to the quality of the quiet coming from below, to the specific feeling of a house that was holding its breath.I turned a page I hadn't read.I didn't hear him come in.That was the thing that stayed with me afterward — I didn't hear the door, didn't hear footsteps, didn't register anything u
Final Nadia's POV I didn't hear everything. But I heard enough. I set the last of my supplies down slowly and watched him end the call and turn toward me with that look — the one that had shifted somewhere between the beginning of the call and the end of it. Like I had changed categories withou
Nadia's POV --- He was not a good patient. Not in the dramatic, thrashing way — Kane didn't move an inch he hadn't calculated first. But there was a stillness to him that wasn't cooperation. It was tolerance. Like he was enduring me rather than accepting help, which was a distinction I felt ever
Nadia's POV --- Getting him off the ground was its own ordeal. He was heavy in the way that had nothing to do with dead weight — all of it was solid, deliberate, like even his body resisted being helped. He made it to his feet on the second attempt, one hand braced against the car, the other han
Nadia's POV --- "Yuck!" I muttered it under my breath, kicking a pebble off the narrow path as I walked. The shortcut through Delvin Road smelled like wet concrete and bad decisions — which was exactly why I never used it. Except tonight my brain decided to betray me. *Take the short route, Na







