FAZER LOGINScarlett’s POV His hands were over mine, warm and solid, pressed flat against his chest with both of his covering both of mine, and his chest rose and fell with a breathing that was not entirely steady, the breathing of someone who had also been holding something for too long and had arrived, in this room with this door closed, at the end of their capacity to hold it.I looked up at him.His eyes were red.Not the red of crying, not the released kind. The red of someone who had not slept and had been somewhere very frightening and had come back from it carrying things that had not finished being processed, that were still moving through him in ways his body was registering even as his face tried to manage the expression.The sight of his red eyes did to me what his steadiness could not.The tears arrived. Quietly, without drama, without the gasping overwhelm of the car park or the clinic bathroom. Just warm and continuous, running down my face with the patient persistence of somethin
Scarlett’s POV I Dragged Cade to his room violently. I closed the door.The sound of it was louder than I intended, the specific acoustic of a door shut with feeling rather than force, the wood finding the frame with a definitiveness that said everything the action was supposed to say.The room was quiet.I looked at him.He looked at me."What game," I said, and kept my voice at a very specific register, the register of someone who has a great deal of feeling available and is choosing, with enormous effort, to direct it toward language rather than its more instinctive destinations, "are you playing?"He said nothing.His hands stayed at his sides. His face stayed in that expression. His eyes, which usually did so much work in the absence of words, were doing something different from their usual communication, something turned inward rather than outward, something that was processing rather than projecting.He said nothing."Cade." I took a step toward him. "I am asking you a direct
Scarlett’s POVThat was the infuriating thing. He was genuinely, effortlessly good at it, and my mother was responding to him the way she responded to people she had immediately classified as worth knowing, with the full, open warmth of a woman who liked people and was not cautious about showing it.Every few minutes she would look at me with an expression that said, see, isn't this nice.Every few minutes I looked at my cake.Madison had begun making small contributions to the conversation, the specific contributions of someone inserting themselves into an exchange they were not part of in order to assess a new variable, her questions slightly sharper than my mother's, aimed at specific edges rather than the generous middle.Ezra handled her questions with the same ease.James remained largely quiet.And I sat in the armchair and smiled when smiling was required and responded when responses were unavoidable and watched the man who had saved me from a gun in an underground parking lev
Scarlett’s POVThe flowers were wildflowers.That was the first thing I noticed, standing in the sitting room with my coffee going cold in my hands and my heart doing something irregular in my chest. Not the arranged, predictable kind that came from a florist with their stems cut to identical lengths and their colours selected for maximum inoffensiveness. These were the kind that grew in fields without permission, in colours that did not coordinate so much as argue beautifully with each other, amber and deep violet and a particular warm gold that caught the afternoon light coming through the sitting room windows and held it.Someone had thought about those flowers.Someone had known that generic roses would not land correctly, that the person receiving them would notice the difference between chosen and purchased, between an arrangement that communicated I considered you and one that communicated I completed a task.I noticed the difference.I was furious at myself for noticing."Scar
Cade’s POVScarlett, who had been sitting in the armchair near the window with her feet tucked under her and her own coffee in both hands and her eyes directed at the middle distance with the practised quality of someone maintaining a neutral expression in a room full of people watching for cracks in it, turned her head toward the entrance hall.I watched her face.Watched the information arrive in it, the name, the word boyfriend, the fact of his presence at the door of the Blackwood estate on the day after Houston, and watched her run it through whatever she was running it through with the rapid, visible quality of a very intelligent person receiving a surprise and processing it faster than surprise usually allowed.Her eyes found mine.The look lasted two seconds.In those two seconds she communicated, without words, without any of the social signals that the others in the room might have read, a question so direct and so specific that it required no translation.Did you know he wa
Cade’s POV Sleep had not been something I had managed with any particular success.I had lain in the west wing bedroom with the ceiling above me and the house quiet around me and my mind doing what my mind did when it had significant material to process and had not been given adequate time or space to process it, which was to run the material repeatedly, from different angles, at different speeds, looking for the version of the picture that made complete sense and finding, each time, that the picture had too many pieces still missing for sense to be achievable.The General's conditions.Ezra's face when those conditions were being stated.The specific quality of over my dead body as a position, which was honest and absolute and which I had meant entirely, and which was also, I had understood in the hours since, not the end of the conversation but the beginning of a different one, a longer and more complicated one that I had not yet had with the person it most directly concerned.This
Scarlett’s POVHis handwriting was exactly as I remembered it from the construction site blueprints I had glimpsed and from the note he had left that first morning after the truck – large and direct and not trying to be anything it wasn't.Don't send her away. Allow her to take care of you.I could
Scarlett’s POV"Father." The single word carried a warning."Son.""We agreed." Cade moved away from the wall, his posture changing, losing the carefully maintained stillness and replacing it with something more agitated, more urgent. "We agreed to keep her separate from the business. From any of i
Scarlett’s POV Lee burst out laughing. “You should see your face…..hahaha!”“Well, you got me there for a sec!”"James asked me to come help clean up loose ends from Silvio’s situation." Her voice was matter-of-fact, professional. "There are still some financial trails to cover, some people who mi
Cade's POVThe ambulance had been an unnecessary theatre, but Rachel had insisted, her maternal instincts overriding any sense of proportion. Now we all stood in a free guest room, the blue suite at the end of the hall that my father had so graciously provided, watching a private physician examine







