MasukSophia’s POV“Which one is it,” Marcus said.She looked at the folder in his hands and at Elijah standing two feet away and at Alyssa already moving back into the crowd and at Kira thirty meters away watching from the pillar and she thought about Victor telling her “don’t improvise, just call me,” and she smiled.“Marcus.” She put her hand on his arm. “Can we go somewhere quiet and talk privately please?”“We’re talking here, Sophia Isabel.”The way he said both names with so much hurt in his eyes, she almost felt pity. “There are people around us.”“I don’t care about the people around us.” He looked at the folder and looked at her. “Answer the question.”“My name is Sophia Mitchell.” She kept her voice low and steady. “You know my name. You’ve known my name for months we’ve been together. You’ve said it every single day for seven months.”“Then who is Isabel Morrison?”“I don’t know who tha
Marcus’s POVHe heard the glass break before he saw anything.A sharp clean sound cutting through the table conversation and Mrs. Adeyemi stopped mid-sentence and looked toward the bar and Marcus looked too, the way everyone near enough looked, and he saw the waiter crouching for the pieces and he saw Elijah standing at the bar and he saw Sophia. He was on his feet before he even decided to stand.“Excuse me,” he said to the table and crossed the room.Sophia hadn’t moved from the bar stool. She was sitting with her bag in both hands and her back straight and her eyes on Elijah and the expression on her face stopped Marcus two steps away because he had never seen it before. Not once since they’ve been together for months. Not at any dinner or argument or difficult conversation or even moment of surprise. He had never seen her face look like that.Like she was calculating the distance to every door in the room, her eyes moving on their own like she’s seen a ghost.“Babe.” He touched h
Elijah’s POVThe woman at the welcome desk found his name on the third line of the second page and drew a small tick beside it and handed him a table card and said enjoy your evening and he thanked her and stepped into the ballroom.He’d worn the navy jacket, the one his stylist in Seoul had picked for the restaurant group’s send-off dinner two weeks ago, because it was the only formal option he’d unpacked and ironing anything else ar early hours of that day wasn’t happening. He straightened his cuffs and looked at the table card and put it in his pocket.His phone buzzed.Kira. A single letter. ?He typed back: In. and put the phone away.The room was full, round tables and black tie and the particular noise of an event that had been going for long enough that the formal parts were over and people had relaxed into their wine, and he stood at the edge of it and let his eyes move.He found Kira first.She was near the far left pillar, clutch in both hands, and when his eyes landed on
Sophia’s POV Mrs. Adeyemi was talking about the Maldives and Sophia was nodding and smiling and saying the right things and watching Marcus from the corner of her eye. He’d come back to the table and sat down and put his arm around her chair and laughed at the right moments and picked up his wine at the right times and everything about him looked exactly right except for the thing underneath it that she couldn’t name precisely but had been feeling since he sat down, a quality of stillness in him that wasn’t his usual stillness, something held rather than something natural. She’d watched Kira cross the room toward him twenty minutes ago. She’d watched them stand together near the pillar by the entrance and she’d watched the way Kira’s body was angled, slightly toward him, slightly away from the room, the positioning of someone having a conversation they didn’t want to read from a distance. She’d watched Marcus’s face do something she couldn’t make out clearly from across the room an
Marcus’s POV“I need you to trust me for just one hour,” Kira said.Marcus looked at his sister and said nothing for a moment. Around them the room moved, glasses clicking with conversation and the low current of two hundred people who had no idea what was happening in this corner of the room.“Kira.”“One hour, Marcus.”“You’re standing here telling me you have proof that my fiancée is not who she says she is and you want me to go back and stand beside her for an hour and act like everything is fine.”“Yes.”“That’s what you’re asking me.”“Yes.”He looked at her. At the steadiness of her eyes and the set of her jaw and the fact that she hadn’t looked away once since she started talking. He’d known this face his whole life, had watched it across breakfast tables and boardroom tables and hospital waiting rooms, and he knew the difference between the face she wore when she was guessing and the face she wore when she was certain.This was the second one.“How long have you known,” he s
Kira’s POVThe Ashford International annual dinner looked the way it always looked, two hundred people in black tie filling the grand ballroom of the Langham, the kind of room that made everyone inside it feel like they’d earned the right to be there, chandeliers running the length of the ceiling, round tables dressed in white linen, the low hum of important conversations happening at a volume designed to sound casual.Kira took a glass of water from a passing tray and moved through the room.She’d been doing this for forty minutes, a slow calculated circuit, pausing at the right tables, saying the right things to the right people, laughing at the right moments, and always, always keeping the main entrance in her peripheral vision.“Kira.” James Obi, their longest standing hospitality partner, caught her arm near the center of the room. “You look wonderful. How is the Phoenix expansion going?”“Ahead of schedule. The Brooklyn location is fully operational and the second site has brok
KIRA POVKira left the house at exactly six in the morning.The sun was barely up and the streets were still mostly empty. She’d barely slept, tossing and turning all night thinking about the email, about the complaint, about who could have possibly done this to her.Marcus insisted on coming with
KIRA POVKira was in her office at Phoenix going through reservation requests when Marcus burst through the door.“Have you seen the news?” he asked.Kira looked up from her laptop. “What news?”Marcus pulled out his phone and showed her the screen.Elite Gossip. A photo of Adrian and Vanessa. The
ADRIAN POVAdrian sat in his hotel room staring at the calendar on his phone. It was seven days until he walked down the aisle and married freaking Vanessa Chen in front of half of New York.His mother had invited everyone. Business partners, investors, society people she barely knew but desperatel
VANESSA POVThree weeks had passed since the disaster that happened at Kira’s restaurant opening and Vanessa was officially living in Adrian’s house.Mrs. Westbrook, one and only.Well, not yet. But soon.“Two years of marriage starting from the wedding da







