MasukCade’s POVI looked at what I had typed.Considered it.Scarlett was off the bed before I had finished considering it, crossing the room with the speed of someone who had read my intentions correctly from across the room, her hand closing around my wrist and yanking the phone downward with both hands and the full commitment of a woman who was not playing.I let her take it."I'm joking," I said, and felt the laugh arrive despite everything, genuine and slightly helpless, the specific laugh of a man who had been caught doing something ridiculous and could not entirely regret it. "I wasn't going to send that."She held the phone against her chest and looked at me with the expression she wore when she was assessing whether I was telling the truth, running the available evidence against her knowledge of my established patterns."I know you, Cade," she said. "You were absolutely going to send that.""Well," I admitted, because she was right and lying about it would have been insulting to b
Cade’s POVThe message notification sat on her screen like a small, deliberate provocation.Scarlett looked at it and looked away, which told me everything I needed to know about whether she had already read the preview on the lock screen, which she had, and whether she intended to make this easy for me, which she did not."Go on," I said. "Check your message.""No." She kept her eyes deliberately elsewhere, performing disinterest with the specific quality of someone very interested. "I'll check it when I want to.""I insist.""And I said no." She turned to look at me then, the fire in her eyes the particular fire of someone who has decided on a position and is not entertaining a review of it.I looked at her for exactly one second.Then I reached past her arm and took the phone from her back pocket."Cade." She grabbed for it immediately, both hands, quick and serious. "Give it back."I raised my arm.She jumped, fingers closing on air, approximately four inches below the phone."You
Scarlett’s POV"I swear," he said, "I will cut his tongue out." His grip on my wrists tightened fractionally, not painfully, just with the increased pressure of someone whose body was expressing what their voice was trying to keep controlled. "You are mine. Mine alone. That has not changed because he showed you a rooftop and smiled at you.""You won't do anything," I said."You know me, Scarlett." His forehead dropped toward mine, not touching, just close, the proximity of something that wanted to close the distance and was holding itself at the last inch. "I don't bluff. Dare me, and I will serve you his tongue on a silver platter.""I dare you," I said."Scarlett." My name came out of him the way it sometimes did, like a sound he had not decided to make, like the word itself had escaped before he could route it through anything more controlled, a low, rough thing that came from somewhere below the anger and the jealousy and all the managed surfaces.I looked at him, at the dark eyes
Scarlett’s POVCade, in a normal state of feeling, was already a significant presence in any room. Cade, with his jaw set and his eyes dark and the particular stillness of a man who has been waiting long enough that the waiting has converted itself into something considerably less patient, was something else entirely.He looked at me the way he looked at things that had caused him genuine concern, with that complete, consuming focus that left no room for anything peripheral. And underneath the concern, visible to anyone who knew how to read him, which I did, entirely and against my better interests, was something that had nothing to do with concern and everything to do with the elevator I had just stepped out of and the two hours I had spent not in this hotel room."Not now, please," I said, moving past him toward the door. "I need to shower and rest. I had a fun afternoon."He turned to follow me."Fun afternoon," he said. He said it the way he repeated things when he was working to
Scarlett’s POV“No, I didn't tell you about Giovanni…”“What?” he giggled. “Yes, you did, when you told me about your love for art and your mentor.”“Ohh yeah… I must have skipped that.”So, I did tell him about Giovanni.About the studio with the northern light and the smell of mineral spirits. About forty years of steady hands and the particular lectures that seemed theoretical until suddenly they were the most practical things I knew. About the morning, I had successfully removed a layer of grime from a painting that had not been seen clearly in decades, the colours coming up like something being born, and Giovanni standing behind me saying nothing for a long time and then saying, quietly, Now you understand.Ezra listened the way he had listened to everything, fully and without hurry, and when I finished, he was quiet for a moment before he spoke."He sounds like the kind of person who changes the shape of how you see things," he said. "So that even after you leave, you are still
Scarlett’s POVI had settled on a sundress, simple and yellow, the kind of thing that required no explanation and offered none, paired with sandals and my hair down, still slightly damp at the ends from the shower. I looked like someone going for a walk. I looked like someone who had not thought too carefully about this.I had thought too carefully about this.Ezra was already there.He was leaning against one of the lobby pillars with the specific quality of ease that some people carried in their bodies naturally, not performing relaxation but actually comfortable with existing in a space, the posture of someone who had arrived and was content to wait without requiring the waiting to be anything other than what it was. He was looking at his phone, not with the anxious scrolling of someone filling time, just reading something with mild interest, and when he heard the elevator, he looked up.His face did the thing.Not elaborate. Not performed. Just a simple, genuine shift, the express
Scarlett’s POVThe world was a fractured mosaic of shadows and blinding white. Through the heavy, rhythmic throb in my skull, I saw him.Silvio Romano stood at the centre of the garden, bathed in the harsh, artificial glow of flashlight beams. His men directed the light with military precision, pin
Scarlett’s POVThe tears came first. Embarrassing and unstoppable, streaming down cheeks that were still damp from the rain. I pressed my lips together, trying to hold back the words that were clawing up my throat.But they came anyway. The way things do when you've been carrying them too long."Si
Scarlett's POV"My grandmother", Tomasso continued at full volume, somehow navigating impossibly narrow streets while maintaining eye contact with me in the rearview mirror, "she used to say that Florence streets are like the veins in your body, all connected, all alive, all going somewhere importa
Scarlett's POVThe wardrobe smelled like Giovanni. Old books and linseed oil and the particular cedar he used to protect his clothes from moths. I pressed myself into the farthest corner, behind winter coats that still carried the scent of his cologne, making myself as small as possible.My phone s







