There was no answer.
Worried now, she hurried after him.
When she reached his room, she found him stumbling back out from the bathroom, barely able to stay upright. One hand was pressed against the wall for support while the other dragged through his messy hair.
He looked absolutely miserable.
Jasper staggered toward the bed, trying to sit down, but his balance completely failed him halfway there.
Amara quickly rushed forward and grabbed his arm before he could fall.
“Careful,” she muttered.
His body weight nearly collapsed against her as she struggled to help him onto the bed.
“You drank way too much,” she scolded softly while helping him sit properly.
Jasper only groaned weakly in response.
Once he was finally stable enough, Amara carefully helped him lie down on the bed. He immediately sank into the mattress with a tired breath, his eyes half-closed as she adjusted the pillow beneath his head.
On the other side of the city, Manhattan was drowning in the chaos of evening traffic. Horns blared nonstop while endless rows of headlights stretched across the road. Felix gripped the steering wheel tightly as he drove through the packed streets.
In the backseat, Elias sat with a cold expression, flipping through a stack of files one after another. Papers rustled softly in the quiet car as his sharp eyes moved over contracts and signatures, focused on finishing work before the night ended.
The car slowly rolled to a stop at a red light.
At that exact moment, Felix’s phone pinged with a notification.
Without thinking much of it, he reached for the phone with one hand and tapped the screen casually. But the second the image opened, his entire body went stiff.
“What the hell?” A shocked gasp slipped out of his mouth.
The sound immediately made Elias look up from the files.
His sharp gaze lifted toward the rearview mirror, locking onto Felix’s face. The color had practically drained from him.
Elias frowned. “What the hell is going on?”
Felix quickly looked away, clearly flustered. “It’s nothing, Mr. Creed. Don’t worry about it.”
He hurried to swipe the notification away and lock the phone, but before he could—
“What is it?”
Elias’s voice came out sharper this time.
Felix’s throat bobbed nervously.
For a second, he hesitated before finally unlocking the phone again with shaky fingers. A nervous laugh escaped him as he held the phone back toward Elias.
Elias took it from his hand.
The second his eyes landed on the photograph, the air inside the car seemed to change.
It was Amara.
The picture looked intimate. Careless. The kind of photo a man took of the woman beside him when he was completely comfortable with her. Her hair looked messy, her cheeks slightly flushed, and the caption beneath it made it even worse.
