Chapter 8

The misplaced Heiress

Miaelle sat at the table, disoriented, the room swimming faintly at its edges. The night kept replaying itself in fragments — Gabriell’s hand covering Mia’s, the flash of cameras, the humiliation and the whispers she could still hear if she let herself listen.

Up until when somewhere in the middle of all that noise, a stranger had appeared out of the dangerous downpour and offered her a way out, and she’d taken it without asking a single question.

He never asked where she wanted to go, and honestly, she wouldn’t have known how to answer. Home wasn’t an option — not the wretched apartment she’d shared with Gabriell, and certainly not the world she’d spent years hiding from everyone but her own family.

So when she woke to find herself at The Eyrie penthouse, it should have terrified her to death. It didn’t, though. Not really. It was in fact one of maybe a dozen addresses in the city built purely for people who didn’t want to be seen wanting anything.

Small mercies, she thought bitterly. At least he hadn’t murdered her yet. Or depicted any sociopath serial killer tendecids.

Instead her mind snagged on the rest of the night, and once it caught there it didn’t let go.

How had she not seen it coming?

She turned the question over and over, looking for the moment she should have noticed. The canceled dates. The way Gabriell had started angling his phone away from her at dinner. She’d had every piece of evidence laid out in front of her for months and looked at each one and decided, every time, to believe him instead.

But Gabriell she could almost understand. Men left. Men lied. It was practically written into the job description of being a man with something to protect. What she couldn’t get past — what kept catching in her throat like something swallowed wrong — was Mia.

Mia, who’d sat cross-legged on her bed at two in the morning listening to her cry about nothing in particular. Mia, who’d zipped up the back of this exact dress three hours ago and told her she looked like she was about to marry the love of her life. Mia, who she’d have called a sister if either of them had ever needed the word to make it official.

She’d loved them both. Not in the careful, rationed way you’re supposed to love people, kept in reserve in case they let you down. She’d loved them the way she apparently loved everyone — completely, stupidly, with nothing held back for herself. And they’d both used that against her at the exact same time.

This wasn’t new, was it. That was the part that scared her most, if she let herself sit in it. This wasn’t the first time she’d loved someone with her whole chest and gotten nothing back but the sound of a door closing. Her parents had managed it first, a long time before Gabriell ever got the chance. Her siblings after that, each of them finding their own quiet way of making clear exactly how much space she was allowed to take up in a family that had never quite decided she belonged in it.

So maybe this was just how it went for her. Maybe some people were built to be left.

No.

She caught the thought before it could finish forming and shoved it back down, angry at herself for even reaching for it. That wasn’t fair to the two people who actually had stayed, who’d shown up for her over and over without needing anything back for it. They existed. That had to count for something.

It should have been enough. It wasn’t, not tonight, not sitting in a stranger’s borrowed coat in an apartment that smelled nothing like home, replaying a proposal that was supposed to have been hers.

She was so tired of being the one left holding the humiliation while everyone else walked away clean. Tired of wondering what exactly was wrong with her — whether she loved too hard, too fast, too obviously, whether there was some correct, guarded way to care about people that she’d simply never learned. Other people got parents who stayed married, siblings who called just to check in, partners who didn’t need a recommendation letter and a prettier woman to remind them what they actually wanted.

She wasn’t going to cry again. She’d already given the ballroom that.

“I made you a drink. I hope it’s to your liking.” The voice pulled her out of it before she could go any further down. His voice was quiet, very careful, pitched low as though he were afraid that anything louder might send her bolting for the door.

He set a cup down in front of her, steam curling off the surface, and stepped back like he didn’t want to crowd her. She stared at it.

Hot chocolate, marshmallows melting slowly into the surface. Her favorite, coincidentally, since she was a child. Her chest tightened at the small, absurd detail. She hadn’t told him that. She hadn’t told him anything.

She wrapped both hands around the cup anyway, mostly to have something to hold onto, and looked up at him instead of the drink. Her hands were still shaking slightly. She pressed them harder against the ceramic to stop it.

He, however, was unfairly attractive. Not in the practiced, magazine-cover way Gabriell had always cultivated — the kind of handsome that knew it was being looked at and adjusted itself accordingly. This was different. Sharper. Less concerned with being noticed at all.

He had the kind of face that belonged on a billboard, sharp cheekbones, a hard jaw, straight slightly pointed nose, even with his dark hair slightly damp and tousled—the kind women fought over in rooms she used to be invited into, back when her name still opened doors instead of closing them.

His ocean eyes settled on her, calm, giving away exactly nothing. No pity, amusement or curiosity. They only mirrored the unsettling depth of a calm sea.

That, somehow, was worse. It made him harder to look away from, not easier. She caught herself noticing and felt something close to disgust at her own timing. She’d been sobbing in front of half the city’s elite less than an hour ago. She had no business cataloguing a stranger’s jawline—again— in the wreckage of it.

She looked away first.

“Ehem.” He cleared his throat, and she realized she’d been staring at the drink instead of touching it. “Is there something wrong with it? You don’t like… marshmallows?” There was something uncertain in the question, almost confused, like he’d expected the drink to land perfectly. As if he’d known, somehow, that it was how she liked it.

“N—no. It’s fine. Thank you.” Her voice came out smaller than she meant it to.

“You’re welcome.” He straightened, walked off toward the kitchen, and a minute later returned to sit across from her, unhurried, as if giving her room to breathe was simply part of how he moved through the world.

“I’m Altair.”