Chapter 1

Adrian Pov

I came home early because the numbers on my screen had stopped making sense.

Four years of shared rent, shared grocery lists, shared quiet Sundays, and the front door still stuck the same way when I pushed it open. The apartment smelled like the citrus cleaner Nathan preferred and something sharper underneath—cologne that was not his.

The bedroom door stood half open.

Nathan stood by the bed with his back to me, folding a shirt that did not belong in our closet. Another man sat on the edge of the mattress, bare-chested, watching him with lazy interest. Their eyes met in the mirror. Neither of them looked surprised.

I stopped in the doorway. My keys stayed clenched in my hand hard enough to dig into my palm.

Nathan finished folding the shirt and set it in the open suitcase on the chair. He turned around like he had been expecting me for hours.

“You’re early,” he said.

The other man reached for his own shirt without hurry. He did not speak. He did not need to. Everything about the room already spoke for him—the rumpled sheets, the two wine glasses on the nightstand, the way Nathan’s mouth looked soft and recently kissed.

My voice came out flatter than I expected. “Get out.”

The stranger glanced at Nathan. Nathan gave a small nod. The man stood, pulled his shirt on, and walked past me without meeting my eyes. The front door closed a few seconds later. The apartment felt larger and quieter in the space he left behind.

Nathan zipped the suitcase. The sound was loud in the silence room.

“I was going to tell you tonight,” he said.

“Tell me what? That you’ve been fucking someone else in our bed, or that you’re leaving?”

He looked at me the way he used to look at spreadsheets—assessing, slightly bored, already finished with the calculation. “Both.”

Four years. I had learned the exact way he took his coffee, the exact sound of his footsteps in the hallway, the exact weight of his arm across my waist at night. None of it had prepared me for the empty calm on his face.

“Was any of it real?” The question sounded small even to me.

Nathan picked up his keys from the dresser. He paused, as if considering whether the answer was worth the effort.

“You were useful,” he said. “That’s all.”

He walked past me. His shoulder brushed mine—warm, familiar, already gone. The front door opened and closed. His footsteps faded down the stairwell.

I stood in the bedroom doorway for a long time after the building went quiet again. The suitcase was gone. The second wine glass still sat on the nightstand, lipstick-free, ordinary. My phone buzzed once in my pocket. I ignored it.

The bed still held the shape of two bodies.

I crossed the room, stripped the sheets in hard, efficient motions, and carried them to the laundry basket like the ordinary task might put the world back in order. It did not. When I returned, the nightstand drawer was slightly open. Nathan’s spare keycard to the subsidiary office sat inside, face up, as if he had meant to take it and forgotten.

Or as if he no longer needed it.

My phone buzzed again. This time I looked.

A notification from the bank. Three transfers in the last forty-eight hours, all large, all from the joint account I had never authorized. The balance was already lower than it should have been.

A second notification followed before I could close the first.

Blackwood Holdings – Internal Compliance

Subject: Mandatory Attendance – Credential Review

You are required to present yourself at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow regarding irregularities linked to your system access.

I locked the phone. The screen went dark in my hand.

Outside, a car door closed. Footsteps moved away down the street. Nathan did not look back.

I sat on the edge of the bare mattress and stared at the place where his suitcase had been. The apartment still smelled like citrus and someone else’s cologne. My keys had left deep red crescents in my palm.

Useful.

That was all.