My Billionaire Lover Traded Me to Secure a Merger

The apartment smelled like her now. Bridget's perfume had gotten into the curtains, the throw pillows, even the towels in the bathroom I used every morning. I scrubbed everything. I lit candles. Nothing worked. It was like she'd already moved in without ever carrying a single box.

I stopped sleeping. I'd lie on my side of the bed, staring at the ceiling, and around midnight I'd get up and put on sneakers and walk. Just walk. Down to the river and back. Past the bodega on the corner where the guy behind the counter started to recognize me, started nodding instead of asking if I needed help. I didn't need help. I needed to not be in that apartment.

I lost track of days. I know it was five nights after the gala because I counted the times I hadn't cried, and I was proud of that number the way you're proud of a diet you're barely surviving.

On the sixth night, I came home and Cassius was there.

He was standing in the kitchen with his sleeves rolled up, which was strange enough on its own. Cassius didn't roll up his sleeves. He didn't stand in kitchens.

"You're up late," I said. I didn't take off my coat.

"I was waiting for you." He said it like it was normal. Like the last two weeks hadn't happened.

I just looked at him.

"Sit down," he said. "Let me make you something."

"I'm not hungry."

"Not food." He turned around and there was a small pot already on the stove, water simmering, and next to it a jar of ginger, sliced thin the way I liked it. Not the way the housekeeper did it. The way I did it, when I made it myself.

Something in my chest folded in on itself.

He used to make me ginger tea in the first year, back when he still noticed things like a sore throat or a bad day. He hadn't made it in — I didn't even know. Years. I'd stopped expecting it so long ago I'd forgotten I used to expect it at all.

"Why now," I said. My voice came out smaller than I wanted.

"Does it matter?" He poured the water over the ginger, added honey, stirred it slow. He brought the mug to me himself. His hand brushed mine when he passed it over, and God help me, I let myself believe for one second that this meant something. That some part of him had woken up. That the man who used to remember how I liked my tea was still in there, buried under the version of him that bought bracelets for cashiers.

I was so tired of being right about him. I wanted, just once, to be wrong.

I drank it.

It tasted like it always had — sharp and warm, ginger biting the back of my throat, honey smoothing it out. I closed my eyes for a second. When I opened them, the kitchen looked slightly wrong, like the edges of everything had gone soft, like I was looking at it through water.

"Cassius," I said, and my own voice sounded far away, underwater too. "I don't feel—"

He was watching me. Not with worry. With something else. Something flat and waiting.

The mug slipped out of my hand. I don't remember it hitting the floor.

—

When I came back, the ceiling was wrong.

Not my ceiling. No crown molding I recognized, no water stain shaped like a rabbit that I used to stare at during sleepless nights. This ceiling was smooth and white and unfamiliar, and there was a chandelier I had never seen in my life.

I sat up too fast and the room tilted. My mouth was dry as paper. My limbs felt like they belonged to someone else, heavy and slow to respond, like I was moving through syrup.

I was fully dressed. That registered somewhere underneath the panic, a small cold fact I grabbed onto. Dressed. Shoes still on. My coat draped over a chair I didn't recognize either.

"Where—" My voice cracked. I looked around. Hotel room. Expensive one. Heavy drapes, a skyline through the gap in them that wasn't my skyline. "Hello?"

A door opened from an adjoining room, slow, deliberate, like whoever was on the other side wanted me to see them coming before they were fully in the frame.

A man. Tall, dark suit jacket already off, sleeves rolled to the forearm. I didn't know him. My heart slammed once, hard, and I scrambled back against the headboard, and he stopped immediately, hands lifting, palms out, like he was showing me he wasn't holding anything.

"Don't come closer," I said. My voice shook now. There was no hiding it anymore.

"I won't." He stayed exactly where he was, a good ten feet away, and didn't move again. "My name is Rhys Carpenter. You're at The Langham. You're safe."

"Safe." I repeated the word like it was in a language I used to know but had forgotten. "Where's Cassius. What did he—"

"I haven't touched you," he said, before I could finish the question. Quiet. Even. Like he'd rehearsed it, or like he needed me to hear that sentence before any other sentence existed. "I want you to hear that first. I haven't touched you. I called a physician the second I understood what he'd done. She's on her way now."

The room swam. I pressed my palm flat against the cool sheet beneath me, trying to find something solid, something that wouldn't move.

"What he'd done," I said. "What did he do."

Rhys didn't answer right away. And in the silence before he did, I already knew — some buried, sober part of me already knew — that whatever he was about to say would be the last piece of the man I'd loved for six years, breaking off and sinking somewhere I'd never get it back.