Chapter 288

[ 1,030 words ]

Julian’s POV

I stood in the doorway and looked at her.

The bruise on her cheek was visible even in the dark. Jude had left his mark on her face and the sight of it made something in my chest move in a way I did not have a clean word for. Not anger — anger had been handled. Something older and heavier than anger. The grief of a man who had been three minutes too slow in a Brooklyn stairwell and twenty-four hours too slow in a Manhattan office.

I went to the bathroom.

I turned the shower on and stood under it until the water running off my hands ran clear. I did not look at the cuts on my knuckles. I washed my hair and stood there in the heat of it for a long time, letting the warehouse drain off me.

I turned the shower off.

I dried off and wrapped the towel around my waist and stood at the bathroom mirror for a moment.

I looked at my own face.

Seven years.

Seven years since Las Vegas. Seven years since Jules and Kat and a marriage certificate with two aliases and a ring I had carried in my jacket pocket for three days before I gave it to her. I had been twenty-seven. She had been twenty. We had been strangers and something else simultaneously, the chemistry of two people who found each other in a place neither of them was supposed to be, doing things neither of them was supposed to be doing, and for one night had decided that none of the rules applied.

And then she was gone.

I had searched for her. Not immediately—immediately I had been young and stupid and had told myself she would surface, that a woman like that did not simply disappear, and that the marriage certificate with two aliases was a thing that would resolve itself in time. But time had passed and she had not surfaced, and the alias had been a wall I could not get past.

She had come back to New York two years ago.

Two years ago she had been standing in front of me in a boardroom, and I had not known. She had been sitting across from me at dinner tables, and I had not known. She had been building a company that was being integrated into my infrastructure, and I had not known.

If she had worn the ring.

If she had walked into that first boardroom with the Windsor fire stone on her finger, I would have known in the first thirty seconds. That was our family ring; I have seen Grandma wearing it for years before she passed it down to me. I had known its shape and its weight and the way the stone caught light in a way no other stone did. I would have known.

But she had not worn it.

For two years she had been in the same city, and she had not worn it, and I had sat across from her at a table and negotiated contracts and not known that the woman across from me was the one I had been searching for.

The magazine. The photo from the magazine was what it took for me to know she was the one. The very same forbidden woman I have been dry humping and finger fucking was my wife.

If Katia wore that ring, I wouldn’t have bothered with her sister. I made a deal with the wrong sister because I had been trying to get close enough to find out if the woman I was watching was who I thought she was. A deal that required me to bring another woman into my house while my wife was standing in front of me not knowing what she was to me.

I pressed my hand against the bathroom mirror.

The cool glass was a flat, indifferent surface.

I had been angry at her for it. For the two years of not wearing the ring, for the alias, and for the careful, invisible life she had built that had kept her hidden from me. I knew it was not rational. I knew she had not known I was looking. I knew she had built that invisible life to protect herself and Aiden from exactly the kind of exposure that men like Jude Wolfe used as weapons.

I knew all of that.

And I was still angry.

I went back to the bedroom.

I pulled on the clean trousers and shirt that I kept in the drawer in her room — because that was the state of things now, I had clothes in her room, she had not asked for an explanation and I had not offered one — and I pulled back the duvet on my side and got in.

She did not stir.

I lay on my back in the dark and looked at the ceiling and listened to her breathe.

The bruise on her cheek was a dark shadow in the dim light. The split lip had been cleaned and had started to heal. She was small in the bed the way she was always small when she was not wearing the armor—just a woman sleeping, carrying everything she carried, not asking anyone for help, and never asking anyone for help.

A tear slipped from the corner of my eye.

I did not wipe it.

I lay in the dark and let it trace its way down into my hair, and I looked at the ceiling and thought about a boy in the room at the other end of the corridor who had been growing up without a father because his father had been searching for his mother under the wrong name in the wrong city for seven years.

I turned my head and looked at her face in the dark.

“Why did you do this to me,” I said quietly. Not loud enough to wake her. Just the words, in the air, between us.

“I hate punishing you.” My voice was almost nothing. “I hate to see you be the target for hungry men with too much appetite p>

If you find any errors (non-standard content, ads redirect, broken links, etc Please let us know so we can fix it as soon as possible.