جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 60

I didn't answer with words.I just closed the remaining distance, and that was answer enough.The kiss was nothing like I expected. Not urgent, not demanding — just certain, the way Kane did everything, like he'd already decided how this was going to go and was simply arriving there. His hand stayed firm at my waist and the other held my jaw like I was something he intended to keep, and I forgot completely about the water I'd woken up for and the hour and everything else that usually occupied the back of my mind.When he pulled back it was only slightly, just enough to look at me, and I became immediately aware that I was standing in a dimly lit room in the middle of the night looking at a man who was watching me with an expression I'd never seen on him before — not the controlled calm, not the unreadable boardroom stillness, but something underneath all of that, something that had apparently been there the whole time waiting for the right moment."You're quiet," he said."You kissed

Kane's POVThe meeting was supposed to take forty minutes.Kane knew something was wrong before he'd been inside ten.The room was right. The building was right. The two men who'd requested the sit-down were exactly who they'd said they were — minor partners, a quarterly update, nothing that should have required his personal presence but had been flagged as sensitive enough to warrant it. All of that was fine.What wasn't fine was the third man sitting in the corner who hadn't been on any list, who stood when Kane entered with the particular stillness of someone who had been waiting specifically for him, and who smiled the way people smiled when they believed they had the advantage.Kane sat down anyway. He didn't look at Lev. Lev had already seen it."Mr. Kane," the third man said, moving his chair closer to the table without being invited. "I was hoping we'd get the chance to speak.""You have a name," Kane said. Not a question."Reeves," the man said. "You don't know me.""I know y

Kane's POV"Should we tell her?"Lev's voice was quiet, the way it always was when the question mattered. They were still in the study, the photograph sitting between them on the desk, the building's faded sign visible even from across the room.Kane looked at it. "No.""She's going to find out eventually—""Not yet."Lev opened his mouth to push further, which he rarely did, which meant he felt strongly enough about it to try, and then the door opened and they both looked up.Nadia stood in the doorway in a oversized shirt and bare feet, her hair loose, one hand on the door frame. She looked between them. "Am I disturbing something?""No," Kane said immediately.Lev was already moving, sliding the photograph casually beneath a folder with the ease of someone who had been making things disappear for years. His expression didn't change. Neither did his pace. He simply set a hand on top of the folder and looked at his phone like that was what he'd been doing all along.Nadia looked at K

Nadia's POVKane came back sometime before I woke up.I knew because his jacket was draped over the back of the chair in the hallway when I came downstairs, which meant he'd come in, set it there without thinking about it, and kept moving — the way he did when something was occupying enough of his attention that the smaller things stopped registering.I'd been doing that lately. Noticing the small things. I wasn't sure when it had started exactly, somewhere between the hospital and the restaurant and falling asleep with his hand at my waist, but it had and there wasn't much I could do about it now.I went to the kitchen first. Tea, bread, the quiet routine of a morning that had started to feel less foreign than it once had. The house was already moving around me — staff appearing and disappearing, the low sound of a conversation somewhere down the corridor, a door opening and closing. Normal. Or what passed for normal here, which wasn't what normal used to mean but had become its own

He left the study just after midnight.The kitchen was quiet and dark except for the light above the counter. He went to the refrigerator, stood in front of it for a moment without really seeing anything inside it, then reached for something and ate standing at the counter while his phone screen lit up beside him.Lev. Three messages sent across the evening like a conversation he hadn't been present for.*His father's man landed at seven.**Already asking questions in the financial district. Two contacts flagged it within the hour.**48 hours. Possibly less.*He read them once, set the phone face down, and looked at the counter. Forty eight hours. The timeline he'd been managing carefully, the one he'd been certain was his to control, had apparently decided otherwise. He stayed with that for a moment, turning it over, and then noticed the plate sitting covered at the end of the counter exactly where the staff had left it hours ago.Untouched.He looked at it longer than he needed to,