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“I want… you.”
Cedric’s eyes flashed like summer lightning and Esme’s nether regions trembled in response. “I can offer you neither love nor romance,” he warned, drawing closer and closer. “But if you want me to take you roughly right here, right now… that I can do. Just don’t ask for more.”
Esme knew instantly that that’s exactly what she wanted. More.
More of him. More of life. More of everything.
But if telling the truth was going to rob her of the excitement and adventure of this forbidden moment, then she would lie happily and freely. She would tell him what he wanted to hear so that he could tell her the same in return.
Esme was done being the perfect daughter. She was done being a good girl. For the first time in her life, she was going to take what she wanted.
And what she wanted… was Cedric.
“Jesus,” I mutter, snapping the book shut. “Who knew?”
I tuck the books back in the bottom drawer—but as I do, one more thing catches my eye: a flash of silver, tucked in the very back, almost out of sight.
I fish it out to find it’s a photograph. Wren is on the left, her arm looped around the waist of another woman who has her same chin. Neither woman is looking at the camera, nor showing any sign that they even know it’s there.
The look on Wren’s face as she smiles down at the other woman in the frame is magnetic. It’s love, pure and simple.
What would it take to make her smile at me that way?
Disgusted at the thought alone, I tear my eyes from the frame and shove it back into the drawer. What the hell am I doing? Even with a gun pressed against my head, I couldn’t tell you why I came to the office in the first place.
I stand back up with an irritated wince and stride to the dark windows that overlook the city.
I used to stay late at the office after Elena’s death. I hated going back to my silent penthouse, and there was something about the spartan emptiness of this building at night that appealed to me.
Sometimes, I’d call Bee and listen to her ramble about whatever date she was going on that night. But more often, I’d just sit in my dark office and stare out at the city lights, the moving cars, the bustle of a world that was moving on without me.
Bee helped restart my life when it felt stuck. She refused to take no for an answer. Wouldn’t let me waste away in grief.
“Elena wouldn’t have wanted this for you, Dmitri. She would have wanted you to live,” she’d told me on the first anniversary of Elena’s death.
So I did live. But in all the wrong ways. I went out, I drank, I visited nightclubs with my brother and took home women whose names I neither remembered nor bothered to ask for in the first place.
And in the end, all I got out of it were a few fleeting moments of distraction.
Because none of those women got under my skin the same way that Elena did. Not a single goddamn one of them lingered in my head after they’d left my presence. As soon as they walked out of my door, they might as well have ceased to exist.
Remembering a woman after she was gone… that only happened once, and I married her.
So when the city’s skyline starts to blur into a hallucinatory image of Wren’s face—it feels invasive. It feels like a betrayal. To whom, though, I’m not sure.
Elena?
Myself?
Who the fuck knows?
“Fuck. I pull out my phone and fire off a quick text to my brother.
Where will you be later?
His reply comes back almost immediately, which means he’s expecting something fun. My brother’s never met a good time that he didn’t say no to.
ALEKSANDR: the Honey Pot prob. Or the Rec Room. but i probably wont be at either one til at least midnight
