CHAPTER 8: RETREAT

It was only Marcus's car, tires screeching too fast out of the front gate, headlights swinging wild across the wet driveway before disappearing into the dark.

"He's running," I said.

"He's not running. He's regrouping." Ryker's voice had gone flat again, all business, the warmth from a moment ago sealed away somewhere I couldn't reach anymore, a door closing so quietly I almost missed the exact second it happened. "Lock your door tonight."

"Ryker…"

"I mean it, Selene." He didn't look at me when he said it, already crossing to his desk, already pulling his phone out to make a call I wasn't invited to overhear. "This isn't a conversation. It's an instruction."

"Ten minutes ago you were admitting things to me. Now I'm getting instructions."

"Ten minutes ago was a mistake." He said it without looking up, and something about the flatness of it landed harder than if he'd shouted, a small precise wound instead of a large messy one. "I don't have the luxury of mistakes right now. Neither do you."

I stood there a second longer, my hand still curled loosely around the folder I'd brought him, watching him fold himself back into the man who'd told me I wasn't what people pictured when they pictured his wife. My throat felt tight in a way I refused to name.

"Understood," I said, and left before he could see my hands shaking on the doorknob.

Breakfast the next morning tasted like nothing. I pushed eggs around my plate and watched the steam curl off Elise's tea, the dining room too bright, too quiet, the empty chair at the head of the table saying more than anyone at it.

"You look tired," Elise observed, watching me over her cup.

"I didn't sleep well."

"Understandable, given the excitement." Her eyes flicked toward Ryker's empty chair. "He's already left for the office. Some emergency with the board, apparently."

"Convenient timing."

"Very." She set her cup down with a soft click that seemed to echo too long in the quiet room. "He does that, you know. Retreats into work whenever something gets close enough to actually touch him. His father was the same way. Practically a family tradition."

"I'm not trying to touch anything, Elise. I'm trying to survive a marriage I didn't ask for."

"Mm." She studied me a moment longer, her sharp eyes missing nothing, the same way they never seemed to miss anything. "Is that all it is?"

I didn't answer. My silence sat between us like something solid, and Elise let it stay there instead of pushing, the way she always seemed to know exactly when pushing would cost more than it was worth.

"For what it's worth," she added, buttering her toast without looking up, "I've watched that man close himself off from every single person who ever tried to get near him since he was a boy. The fact that he's bothering to run from you at all tells me something worth paying attention to."

"Or it tells me he's running because he doesn't want anything to do with me."

"Men like Ryker don't run from things that mean nothing to them," Elise said, her voice gentle but firm. "They ignore those. Running takes effort."

He didn't come home until well after midnight. I lay awake listening for him anyway, my whole body tensed toward the hallway the way a plant leans toward a window it can't quite reach. When his footsteps finally came, slow, careful, deliberately quiet, they passed my door without stopping, and something in my chest sank low enough that I pressed a hand flat against my sternum, as if I could hold whatever it was in place.

By morning, he was armor from head to toe.

"I've hired outside auditors," he said at breakfast, eyes on his tablet, not on me. "For Northgate and every account attached to it. I don't want amateur hour getting either of us hurt."

"Amateur hour," I repeated.

"You brought me the lead. That's useful. It's not the same as knowing how to build a case that survives a courtroom." He finally looked up, that clinical sweep in his eyes again, the one I remembered from the very first night I'd met him, the one that made me feel measured instead of seen. "I appreciate the help. I don't need a partner in this."

"Careful," I said, my fork going still against the plate. "Almost sounds like you're afraid of needing anyone."

"I don't need anyone. It's a more efficient way to live." He said it flatly, and for one brief, ugly second, it landed exactly the way the photograph comment had landed at that engagement party, precise, dismissive, a fact delivered like a spec sheet, the exact same rhythm underneath two entirely different insults. I wondered if he even heard the echo himself.

"You know," I said, my voice steady even though my hands weren't, "you have a real talent for making a person feel exactly as small as you first decided they should be."

Something flickered across his face, gone too fast to read. He didn't answer, just turned back to his tablet like the words had never landed at all.

"Fine," I said, pushing back my chair. "Then I'll go back to being invisible. You've had plenty of practice not noticing me. Shouldn't be hard to pick back up."

I found Julian at the coffee shop that afternoon, needing anywhere that wasn't the estate, wasn't full of Kanes pretending nothing simmered beneath every conversation.

"He's doing the thing again," Julian said, before I'd even pulled out my chair.

"What thing?"

"The thing where he lets you close enough to matter and then punishes you for it by pretending you never mattered at all." He slid a coffee across the table, already made exactly the way I liked it, already knowing what I needed before I'd said a word. "I've watched you describe this man in a hundred different ways over the last few months. That particular tone in your voice today is new."

"There's no tone."

"There's absolutely a tone." He raised an eyebrow, unconvinced. "I'm not saying it's a good idea. I think it might be a spectacularly bad idea. I'm just saying I noticed it."

"He married me because he had no other choice, Julian. He's made that clear enough times that I've stopped needing the reminder."

"That was true six months ago. I'm not so sure it's still the whole truth now." He wrapped both hands around his own cup, watching me carefully, the steam fogging faintly against his glasses. "You don't have to decide anything today. I just don't want you pretending you don't feel what you clearly feel, just because admitting it scares you."

I didn't argue, because arguing would have meant admitting he wasn't wrong, and I wasn't ready to hand that particular truth over to anyone yet, not even him.

My phone buzzed on the table between us, the screen lighting up before either of us reached for it.

Marcus met with someone from Vivian's old therapist's office this morning. I don't know what that means yet. But I don't like it.

I stared at the words until they blurred, my stomach twisting into something cold and unfamiliar.

"What is it?" Julian asked, already reading the shift in my face.

I turned the phone toward him. I watched him read it twice, his usual easy expression sliding into something far more serious, the coffee shop noise around us suddenly very far away.

"Vivian's therapist," he said slowly. "Why would Marcus need anything from her therapist's office?"

"I don't know. But it can't be good."

"You need to tell Ryker about this one. Tonight. Whatever's going on between the two of you right now, this is bigger than pride."

I looked down at my own hands, still faintly trembling around the coffee cup, and understood, with a certainty that settled cold and heavy in my chest, that whatever we were about to uncover was going to cost far more than money.