LOGINAmber’s POV I had just woken up when I got a text from Denise. Private gig this morning, if you’re free. Client asked specifically for someone experienced and discreet. Pays well. Let me know. This was only my second real booking since the emergency room, and I was still getting used to the way my phone could pull me out of an ordinary morning and into somebody else’s life without any warning at all. I lay there for a second before I got up, staring at the ceiling, still half asleep, thinking about the fact that a week ago I hadn’t had a single job in six years and now I had two, and there was something almost dizzying about how fast that had happened. I texted back that I was free, got dressed, and asked her for the address, and she sent it over along with a short note that the client preferred privacy, no recordings, nothing written down beyond what the job required. It didn’t strike me as strange. Plenty of clients wanted privacy, especially for legal or family matters, and I’d
Amber’s POVNikolai left for work a little after seven, and I stood at the window and watched his car pull out of the drive until it disappeared around the corner, and something in me settled into place the moment he was actually gone.I had read that clause in the contract more times than I wanted to admit. Two billion dollars, forfeited to him, if I was ever the one to end this marriage. He’d made a point of showing it to me himself, like he wanted me to understand exactly what walking away would cost before I ever let myself imagine it. I think he expected the number to make the idea of leaving feel impossible. Instead it had done something else entirely. It had given me a number. A target. Something concrete to work toward instead of just waiting, the way I’d spent my entire life waiting, for someone else to decide when I was allowed to want something for myself.I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life folded into whatever shape this house needed me to be, cooking dinners nobo
Nikolai’s POVI heard her fall asleep at that table before I ever closed my door.I stood in the hallway longer than I should have, listening to the particular stillness of a house with someone in it who wasn’t moving anymore, and some part of me, the part I generally didn’t let make decisions, wanted to walk back into that kitchen and carry her to a bed that wasn’t a hard wooden chair. I didn’t. I went to my room instead, and I closed the door the way I closed every door that mattered, firmly, finally, and I told myself the distance was necessary and didn’t examine the word necessary too closely, because I already knew what I’d find if I did.I had built my entire life on the principle that anything I let myself want too openly became a weakness someone else could use against me. It was a rule that had kept me alive in rooms that had killed better men than me. It had never once had to survive someone setting a table for two and waiting up for me to notice.I woke early the next morni
Amber’s POVNikolai was already gone by the time I woke up.I found that out the way I found out most things in that house, by walking through it alone and noticing what was missing rather than being told anything directly. His side of the bed, which I hadn’t actually shared with him, had been left untouched the night before, since he’d shown me to a room of my own without much explanation beyond the fact that it was mine now. The house was silent in a way that felt less like peace and more like waiting, like it was holding its breath for someone to fill it with noise it wasn’t sure it wanted.I sat at the kitchen table for a long time that morning doing nothing at all, just turning the ring on my finger and looking at the contract still sitting where I’d left it the night before, and I thought, not for the first time, that I had spent most of my life waiting for someone to tell me what version of myself I was supposed to be that day.That was the part I never let myself examine too c
Nikolai’s POVThe night before the wedding, Isabel called me a little after eleven, and I already knew what she was going to say before she said it.“You don’t want this,” she said, no greeting, straight into it. That was one of the only things I’d ever liked about her. She didn’t waste time pretending. “And I don’t either. I think we’ve both known that since the day our fathers shook hands on it.”I didn’t deny it. There was no point denying something true to the one other person in the arrangement who already knew it. “No,” I said. “I don’t.”“Good. At least we agree on something.” I heard her exhale on the other end, something tired underneath it, older than her actual age. “I wasn’t even supposed to be the only one getting married off this week, you know. It was going to be a package. You and me. And my stepsister to some friend of my father’s, some man twice her age who’s been circling for a deal of his own.”I hadn’t heard that part. My father’s people had briefed me on the term
Amber’s POVMy stepfather’s arm was rigid under my hand, and I hated how steady he made himself look, like he was walking his own daughter down the aisle instead of a girl he’d been threatening to send away since I was fourteen. He didn’t look at me once. He was too busy nodding at people on either side of the aisle, small careful nods, the kind you give when you’re still working even at your own daughter’s wedding.The room wasn’t big. I think that surprised me more than anything else that day. I had pictured something enormous, something with hundreds of eyes on me, because that was what weddings were supposed to be. Instead there were maybe forty people total, arranged in careful rows, and every single one of them felt like they belonged to a different world than the one I’d grown up in. Nikolai’s people didn’t dress like my stepfather’s business associates. They didn’t laugh the way normal people laughed at weddings, easy and loud. They sat very straight, and they watched everythi







