Page 184 of Suite 7

My phone buzzes as I reach the car.

Kane: Can you meet me at Eclipse? Ten PM tonight?

I stare at the message.

We haven’t been back to Eclipse for a while. Not once since I moved in. We have the dungeon at his place. It’s become our space, our sanctuary, the room I still touch the doorframe of sometimes, because I can.

Why Eclipse? Why now?

Me: Should I be worried?

Kane: No. Trust me.

Me: Always.

I sit in the driver’s seat without starting the engine. The city hums around me, indifferent. I check the time. Nine forty-seven PM. If I go home to change I’ll be late.

I think about what I’m wearing. The blazer. High heels. An outfit that screams of a woman who just ran a flawless event for two hundred people and fixed a problem before anyone knew it existed.

I think: maybe this is exactly what to wear.

I start the engine.

I go straight there, and when I park outside the warehouse district building I sit for a moment with my hands in my lap, breathing. Looking at the place that has no signage because the right people already know where it is.

The first time I came here I almost cancelled seventeen times.

Tonight I’m out of the car before I’ve finished the thought.

Anya at reception smiles when she sees me, that knowing smile that makes my stomach flip.

“Suite 7,” she says before I can ask. “He’s waiting.”

Suite 7.

The corridor is exactly as I remember it — the quiet that deepens with each step away from the bar, the hush of this place that always feels like held breath. My heels are too loud. I notice, as I always notice, the faint smell of cedar and warm candle wax, the scent that has lived in my memory since the first night I walked this hallway blindfolded, not knowing who was waiting, not knowing that everything was about to rearrange itself into a truer shape.

I put my hand on the doorknob and open the door.

The room is transformed.

Candles everywhere, dozens of them, casting warm golden light across every surface. The air smells of beeswax and something faintly floral. Music playing softly — something instrumental and slow, unhurried, the kind of music that doesn’t ask anything of you. The furniture is the same but the room is different, more intimate.

When I enter he is standing by the cross and turns.

That smile. The one that belongs only to me. The one I didn’t know existed until I’d earned it.

“Hi,” I manage.

“Hi.” He crosses the room and frames my face in his hands, kisses me soft and slow. When he pulls back his eyes move over my face the way they always do — taking inventory, making sure I’m here, that I’m real. “You look beautiful.”

“You’re making me nervous.”

“I know.” He takes my hand. “Come sit.”

He pours champagne, hands me a glass, sits beside me with his knee touching mine. I take a sip and feel the bubbles and try to slow my heartbeat down.

“Kane. What’s going on?”