Page 56

“It just happened all at once.” My voice is gravel when I speak. “One minute he was in the elevator with me, his body pressed tightly against mine, and then that woman showed up, his ex, and he held her and walked right out. He didn’t look at me even once, not the way he looks at me when we are alone. By the time I got home, the transfer notice was already sitting in my inbox, waiting there in the dark to finish me off for the night.”

“The man himself said it?” Margo asks.

“Not in words. But it came from his email account.”

“Then how do you know for certain it was even his decision?”

I quirk my lips and give her a bitter little smile.

Margo lifts both hands. “Fine, I know. Who else would dare make a fuggin’ call like that one. But it still feels wrong to me. It’s all too fast.”

“Some people throw away the things they don’t need very fast,” I say. The words open a wound in my chest, and a different kind of cold floods in.

I make myself tell her the rest. How Yelena asked me to fetch her water. How Yelena poured the lukewarm glass down her conveniently plunging neckline and staged a performative collapse. How Lev walked in and would not let me explain a single thing, only checked whether she was hurt, and then made me apologize to her.

“He believed her completely,” I say. “He would not give me one chance to explain myself.” The bitterness coats the whole inside of my mouth, and my nerves make me quick to anger.

“She was faking the entire thing, luring him in, and he was too stupid to see through it.”

Margo says it too loudly, and the couple at the next table turn to look, eyes bouncing between us. She pauses and gives them a polite smile. “Sorry,” she says to them. “We’re discussing a very failed wedding.”

They turn back to their food and settle in contentedly. I should laugh at that. But my mouth barely moves before my eyes start to burn again.

“He’s my boss, and I still have to say it,” Margo hisses. “He’s an asshole, and paycheck or not, I will gut him. And that Yelena, pulling tricks this cheap. She didn’t come back for her ex. She came back for a performance and a little vengeance.”

“But she won,” I say, and let out a chuckle with no humor in it.

“Only because the judge was on her side before the trial even started.” Margo curses under her breath.

My fingers tighten around my spoon. That is the part that hurts the most, and Margo sees it, and she covers my hand with hers, bringing the warm scent of vanilla and citrus from her lotion with it.

“I feel so stupid,” I say. “Every single time, I wanted so badly to believe he cared about me. I kept burning up like a moth in a flame.”

“Delaney, this is not your fault.” Margo’s voice softens. “You believed him because he made you think you could.”

My phone buzzes on the table between us, and the sender’s name stops the breath in my chest, because it’s Lev Volkov.

My heart slams against my ribs despite yesterday’s injury, and I catch myself pressing my thighs together under the table, some reckless part of me still turned on from yesterday at the mere sight of his name.

He’s finally reached out.

Maybe he will say the transfer is only temporary. Maybe he’ll ask why I have not come back upstairs, in that low tone that promises sinful things. I open it.

“New Project: Wedding planning for Lev Volkov and Miss Yelena Lebedeva, to be coordinated by Delaney Cox through Sablo House events. Please submit a preliminary proposal as soon as possible.”

The whole world goes quiet around me. Every word on that screen sits perfectly straight, black, and empty of any feeling, the signature of someone who clings to control, and they slice yesterday’s wound wide open again, and I feel the start of tears rolling down my cheeks.

It’s a wedding.

A few weeks ago, I carried Sazeracs to my ex-boyfriend and the friend I had trusted most in the world while she flashed her engagement ring at me, and then I went down in a puddle of gin in front of the whole room. I thought at the time that was the cruelest joke life could ever pull on me. I badly underestimated it.

Now I have to plan Lev’s wedding to the woman he actually loves. I have to choose their venue and decide what lighting Lev will stand under while he watches another woman walk down the aisle toward him. My hands shake, and the two names melt together through my tears, mocking me for not even knowing my own place.

“Hey.” Margo’s voice cuts back through to me. “Why are you crying now?”

I open my mouth, and nothing at all comes out of it. I push the phone across the table to her instead. She reads it, her jaw clenches, and her face hardens to stone.

“He wants you to plan their wedding?”