Kade's shadow bled under the door gap.

A thin, wavering line of gold light, but it was enough. Enough to know he was right there, close enough that I could hear his voice—low, loose, the way it got when he'd had too much and cared too little.

"Nah, the blonde one, man. She had this thing with her—"

Laughter. Male laughter, rough and careless, rolling down the corridor like a stone.

I stopped breathing.

Ryker's hand was still clamped over my mouth. His palm was dry and warm, the calluses catching on the corner of my lip. I could feel every ridge of his fingerprints. The closet was barely big enough for one person, let alone two, and he was everywhere—his chest solid against my shoulder blades, his arm a bar of iron across my waist, his breath coming slow and even against the top of my head like none of this cost him anything.

My whole body was shaking. I couldn't stop it. The tremors started somewhere deep in my chest and worked outward, until even my fingers were vibrating at my sides.

Ryker noticed. Of course he did.

His thumb moved. Slow, deliberate—a single drag across the curve of my lower lip. Not cruel. Almost curious. Like he was testing the temperature of something he hadn't decided whether to burn yet.

I felt him inhale. Long and quiet, his chest expanding against my back. Taking in the vanilla of my perfume, the sweat underneath it, the fear. Cataloguing me.

Outside, Kade was still talking.

"—and the other one, the one in red? She kept saying my name like it was a prayer, you know what I mean?"

More laughter. A girl's giggle, high and performative.

The tears came before I could stop them. Hot, humiliating—they slid down over Ryker's fingers, and I hated myself for every single one. I squeezed my eyes shut. Don't. Don't do this here. Not in front of him.

But the image was already there, burned into the back of my eyelids. Kade on that velvet couch. Four pairs of hands. That hollow, glittering smile he'd never once turned on me like that—like I was something worth consuming.

Ryker went very still.

Then his hand shifted. Not away—never away, not yet—but his grip changed. His thumb and forefinger closed around my chin, firm enough that I couldn't turn my head, and he tilted it up and to the side, forcing me to face the dark where he stood.

I couldn't see him. The closet was pitch black. But I could feel his eyes.

"Don't." His voice was barely a breath, but it hit like a slap. Low and rough, stripped of any pretense. "Don't you dare cry over a boy who doesn't even know how to touch you."

I tried to pull away. His grip tightened.

"Look at me, Sienna. Look."

There was nothing to look at. Only darkness. But somehow I understood what he meant—stop disappearing into your own head, stop making yourself small, stop dissolving over someone who is out there right now describing some girl's body to his friends like a transaction.

My breath came out ragged. Broken.

"He doesn't—" My voice cracked. I tried again. "He doesn't even know I left."

Ryker said nothing. But the pressure of his fingers on my chin didn't ease. He held me there, in the dark, until my breathing slowed. Until the shaking dulled to something I could almost control.

Outside, the voices faded. Footsteps—Kade's, I recognized the lazy drag of his heel—moved away down the corridor. The line of gold light under the door thinned, then disappeared entirely.

Silence.

Ryker released my mouth. He didn't step back.

"He's gone," I said. Stating the obvious. Filling the dark with something.

"I know."

Neither of us moved.

The air in the closet had changed. It wasn't just fear anymore—it was something denser, something with weight and edges. I was acutely aware of how small the space was. How close his mouth was to my temple. How his hand had dropped from my chin but his other arm was still loosely around my waist, like he'd forgotten it was there, or like he hadn't decided to let go yet.

"You should leave," I said.

"Probably."

He didn't move.

I turned around. It was a mistake—it made the closet smaller, put us face to face with barely an inch of air between us. In the dark I could just make out the pale slash of his jaw, the glint of his eyes. That mouth, always curved like it knew a joke you'd never be told.

"What do you want, Ryker?"

He looked at me for a long moment. The kind of look that took inventory.

"Tomorrow night," he said. "Family dinner. The kind where my father makes speeches and Kade sits at his right hand and everyone pretends the Voss name doesn't have blood under its fingernails."

I stared at him. "What about it?"

"Come with me."

The words landed quietly, but they detonated on impact.

"You're serious."

"I'm always serious." A pause. "Come as my date. Sit across the table from him. Let him spend the whole evening watching you and wondering when you stopped looking at him like he hung the stars."

My chest tightened. "That's—you want to use me to humiliate your brother."

"I want to give you a front-row seat to watch him realize what he threw away." His voice dropped, something dangerous threading through it. "Those aren't the same thing."

They were. They absolutely were. And yet something in my ribcage pulled toward it anyway—some wounded, furious part of me that had spent months being invisible, being patient, being good, watching Kade look through me like glass.

I opened my mouth to say no.

Ryker moved.

His hand slid to the neckline of my dress—not rough, not grabbing, just two fingers dipping beneath the fabric at my collarbone. I felt the cool edge of something hard and flat against my skin before he released it, and it settled there, heavy and foreign against my sternum.

A card. Black matte, no visible text. The kind of card that didn't need any.

His fingers traced the line of my collarbone as he withdrew, the touch so light it was almost nothing. Almost.

"Buy the most dangerous dress you can find," he said. His voice was quiet, almost gentle, which made it worse. "Something he'll spend the whole night trying not to look at."

He reached past me and pushed the closet door open. Light spilled in, sudden and sharp. He stepped out like none of this had happened, like he hadn't just rearranged something fundamental in the air between us.

At the threshold, he glanced back.

"I want him to see exactly what he doesn't get to have anymore." The smirk returned, but it didn't reach his eyes. His eyes were something else entirely. "Eight o'clock. Don't be late."

Then he was gone, swallowed by the neon and the noise, leaving me standing in the doorway of a janitor's closet with his black card burning cold against my skin and the ghost of his thumb still on my lip.

I pressed my hand flat to my sternum, feeling the hard edge of the card beneath my dress.

I should throw it away.

I knew that.

I also knew I wasn't going to.

He showed up at eight in the morning.

I hadn't slept. I'd spent the night sitting on my bathroom floor with Ryker's black card pressed between my palms, turning it over and over until the edges were warm from my skin. I'd told myself a hundred times to throw it in the trash. I'd told myself a hundred times I wasn't going to that dinner.

I was still holding the card when the pounding started.

Three hard knocks. Then his voice.

"Sienna. Open the door."

Kade.

I closed my eyes. Breathed. Then I tucked the card into the pocket of my robe and went to answer it.

He looked like he hadn't slept either, but on Kade it just looked rakish—hair slightly disheveled, jaw unshaved, eyes bright with the particular energy of someone who'd been rehearsing a speech on the drive over. He was already talking before I'd fully opened the door.

"It was just a joke, Sienna! They offered, I looked, it means nothing!"

He pushed past me into the apartment, one hand raking through his hair, the other slamming flat against my kitchen counter hard enough to rattle the mugs on their hooks. The sound cracked through the morning quiet like a gunshot.

I stood by the open door for a moment. The autumn air from the hallway was cold against the back of my neck. Then I closed it, slowly, and turned around.

"You looked," I said.

"That's all I did!" He spun to face me, spreading his hands wide—that gesture he used when he wanted to look reasonable, like he was offering me something. "You're so uptight about everything, Sienna. You always have been. If you weren't so—" he stopped, recalibrated, softened his voice to something almost gentle "—so reserved all the time, maybe I wouldn't need to—"

"Don't." The word came out flat. Quiet. Steadier than I felt.

I crossed my arms over my chest without thinking, a reflex, a shield against the way his eyes were moving over me even now—assessing, cataloguing, looking for the angle that would work.

He switched tactics immediately. He always did.

"Baby." He stepped toward me, voice dropping to something low and coaxing. "Come on. You know I love you. Last night was nothing. Those girls were nothing. You're the one I came back to, aren't you?"

He reached for my wrist.

I stepped back.

His hand closed on air, and something shifted in his face—the softness curdling at the edges, the performance slipping.

"You're really going to do this?" His voice had an edge now. "Over nothing?"

"You think I'm stupid, Kade." My voice was shaking, but I didn't stop. "You didn't just look. You wanted them to make me feel like nothing."

The words came out ragged, torn from somewhere I'd been keeping sealed for a long time. I watched them land. Watched his jaw tighten.

"That's insane," he said. "That's—you're being insane right now."

He moved fast. His hand shot out and grabbed my wrist, fingers wrapping tight, the way he always did when he wanted to remind me of the difference in our sizes—casual, almost bored, like restraining me was an afterthought. He tugged me toward him.

"Stop it," he said, quiet and certain. "Stop making this into something it isn't. Come here."

I looked down at his hand on my wrist.

Then I looked at the mug of coffee on the counter beside me. Still steaming. I'd made it an hour ago and never drunk it.

I picked it up with my free hand and poured it onto the floor directly in front of his feet.

The hot liquid splashed across the tile and over the tops of his shoes. He recoiled instantly, releasing my wrist, stumbling back a half-step with a sharp curse. The mug hit the counter with a crack but didn't break.

"What the—"

"Get out." My voice didn't shake this time.

He stared at me. Coffee dripped from the hem of his trousers. His face had gone through three different expressions in the span of two seconds—shock, fury, something almost like recalculation.

Then the fury won.

"You think you can—" He started toward me again, and this time the softness was completely gone. His shoulders were up, his hands balling at his sides, and I recognized that look. I'd seen it before, always right before he said something designed to cut so deep it would take days to stop bleeding.

I didn't move. I held his gaze and I did not move.

The knock at the door stopped him cold.

Not a knock, actually. More like a single authoritative rap—the kind that didn't ask permission. We both turned.

The door opened.

Two men stepped in. Dark suits, no expression. The kind of men who didn't need to announce themselves because their presence was announcement enough. I'd never seen them before, but I recognized the quality of them—the way they moved, the way they occupied space. Ryker's men. I knew it before either of them spoke.

The first one was carrying something. A garment bag, long and black, handled with the careful precision of something irreplaceable. He crossed the apartment without looking at Kade and laid it across the back of my sofa like it was the most natural thing in the world.

The second man looked at Kade.

His voice was completely empty of inflection. "Get out. Mr. Voss's fiancée needs to get dressed."

The silence that followed was enormous.

I felt it pressing against my eardrums, felt the way the air in the room changed—thickened, charged. Kade had gone completely still. The fury had drained out of his face, replaced by something I'd never seen there before.

Fear.

His eyes moved from the bodyguard to me. Then to the garment bag on my sofa. Then back to me.

"Fiancée," he repeated. The word came out wrong, like a foreign language he'd never learned to pronounce.

I said nothing.

I kept my arms crossed and my face still and I let him stand there in his coffee-stained shoes and I said absolutely nothing at all.

The bodyguard by the door didn't move. Didn't repeat himself. Just waited, patient as stone, for Kade to do the math.

Kade's mouth opened. Closed.

He looked at me one more time—and for just a moment, beneath the shock and the fear, I saw something else flicker across his face. Something that looked almost like the beginning of understanding. Like a man who'd been playing a game suddenly realizing the board had been rearranged while he wasn't paying attention.

Then he walked out.

The door clicked shut behind him.

I exhaled.

My knees wanted to buckle. I didn't let them. I stood there in my robe in my coffee-splattered kitchen and I breathed until the shaking in my hands slowed to something manageable.

Then I turned and looked at the garment bag on my sofa.

Slowly, I crossed the room and unzipped it.

The dress inside was black. Of course it was. But it was black the way a night sky is black—not absence, but depth. The fabric caught the morning light and threw it back in fragments, and even on the hanger it looked like something designed specifically to make a room fall quiet.

Tucked into the interior pocket of the garment bag was a single strip of paper. No greeting, no signature. Just four words in sharp, angular handwriting:

*Don't forget the card.*

I reached into the pocket of my robe.

The card was still there, warm from my skin.

I stood there for a long moment, holding the dress in one hand and the card in the other, and I thought about Kade's face when he'd heard the word *fiancée*. The way the certainty had gone out of him like a light switching off.

I thought about Ryker's voice in the dark. *Let him spend the whole evening watching you and wondering when you stopped looking at him like he hung the stars.*

I hung the dress on the back of my bedroom door.

Eight o'clock. I wasn't going to be late.

The diamond necklace was cold.

Not just cool—cold, the way metal gets when it's been sitting in a velvet box in an air-conditioned room, waiting. Ryker's fingers brushed the back of my neck as he fastened the clasp, and the chill of it spread down my collarbone like ice water, settling against my sternum right where his black card had rested the night before.

I stared at my reflection in the floor-length mirror of his penthouse and tried to remember how to breathe.

The dress was worse up close. Better. Both. The red fabric clung to every curve I'd spent years learning to dress around—the soft weight of my hips, the roundness of my stomach, the fullness of my chest. In my apartment this morning, on the hanger, it had looked like a weapon. On my body, it looked like a confession.

I crossed my arms over my midsection without thinking.

Ryker's hands closed around my wrists and batted them away. Not gently. The motion was blunt, almost impatient, like he'd caught me doing something offensive.

"Stop that."

His voice came from just behind my left ear. In the mirror, I could see him—black suit, no tie, the top button of his shirt open in a way that somehow looked more deliberate than casual. His eyes weren't on my face. They were moving over my reflection with the slow, unhurried attention of someone taking inventory of something that belonged to them.

I felt my face heat. "I'm just—"

"I know what you're doing." He stepped closer, until his chest was against my shoulder blades and his hands settled on my waist—not gripping, just resting, heavy and certain. "You've been doing it since you put the dress on. Hiding."

"I'm not hiding. I'm just—it's a lot of dress."

"It's not enough dress." His thumbs pressed in, just slightly, against the curve of my waist. "That's the point."

I tried to look away from the mirror. His hand came up and caught my chin, the same way it had in the dark of the janitor's closet—firm, unapologetic, tilting my face back toward our reflection.

"Look," he said.

I looked. I didn't want to. I looked anyway.

His hands moved. Slow, deliberate—one sliding from my waist to the curve of my hip, the other tracing upward along my ribcage. Not hurried. Not testing. Like he had all the time in the world and no interest in wasting it. His palm curved over the fullness of my hip and stayed there, warm and heavy.

"You hide these curves like they're a sin, Sienna." His voice was low. Gravelly. The kind of voice that didn't ask for your attention—it just took it. "Tonight, I'm going to show you how a real man worships them."

The word landed somewhere behind my sternum and detonated quietly.

I watched his hand move in the mirror—across the swell of my hip, up the side of my waist, every place I'd trained myself not to look at in photographs, every place I'd learned to angle away from cameras and compress under shapewear and apologize for in the dark. His touch didn't apologize. It didn't accommodate or minimize. It simply claimed.

"Ryker." My voice came out smaller than I intended.

"Mm."

"This is still just strategy. Right?" I needed to say it out loud. I needed to hear what it sounded like. "Tonight is still just—"

"Tonight is whatever it needs to be." His eyes met mine in the mirror, and something in them was very still, very direct. "But right now, in this room, you're going to stop apologizing for what you look like."

His other hand pressed flat against my stomach—the exact place I'd been covering, the exact place I hated most. I felt my breath catch. Felt the instinctive urge to pull away, to suck in, to make myself smaller.

I didn't.

I stood there and let him hold me still, and I watched in the mirror as something shifted in my own face—the tight, braced quality around my eyes loosening by degrees, the set of my jaw softening. The diamonds at my throat caught the light and scattered it across the ceiling.

For the first time in longer than I could remember, I looked at my own body and didn't immediately start cataloguing its failures.

I looked like someone worth looking at.

Ryker's mouth curved. Just slightly. Like he'd watched the thought cross my face and filed it away.

"There," he said quietly. "Now you're ready."

---

The Voss family home was the kind of place that made you feel underdressed even in your best. All marble and warm amber light, the kind of lighting that cost more than most people's rent and made everyone inside look like they'd been professionally lit. The driveway alone could have swallowed my entire apartment building.

Ryker's hand rested at the small of my back as we walked toward the entrance. Light pressure. Proprietary. The diamonds at my throat felt warmer now, warmed by my skin, no longer cold.

I could hear the dinner through the closed doors—the low murmur of conversation, the clink of crystal, the particular hum of money and power gathered in one room pretending to be a family.

Ryker glanced down at me. "Ready?"

I thought about Kade's face this morning. The coffee on his shoes. The word *fiancée* falling out of the bodyguard's mouth like a grenade.

"Open the door," I said.

He did.

The room was everything I'd expected—long table, candlelight, the collected gaze of people who'd learned early that looking bored was a form of power. Every head turned as we entered. I felt the attention move across us like a wave, felt the moment it landed and stuck.

I kept my chin up. Kept my hand light on Ryker's arm. Let them look.

I found Kade in the crowd without trying. He was near the far end of the room, one hand wrapped around a glass of something amber, the other arm loosely around the shoulders of a girl I recognized from last night—blonde, laughing at something he'd said, tilting into him with the easy confidence of someone who didn't know yet that she was temporary.

He was smiling. That lazy, careless smile I'd spent months trying to earn.

Then someone near him said something, or maybe he just felt the shift in the room's attention, because he turned.

His eyes found me.

The smile died.

I watched it happen in real time—the way his face went through recognition, then confusion, then something that cracked open underneath both of them. His gaze moved from my face to the red dress to the diamonds to Ryker's hand at my back, and I saw the exact moment he did the math.

The glass slipped from his fingers.

It hit the marble floor and shattered—a sharp, bright explosion of sound that cut through every conversation in the room. Crystal and amber liquid scattered across the tile. The girl beside him flinched back. Several people turned.

Kade didn't move. He just stood there in the sudden silence, staring at me, with the broken glass at his feet and something irreparable spreading across his face.

Ryker's hand pressed lightly against my spine.

I didn't look away from Kade.

I let him see every inch of me—the dress, the diamonds, the way I was standing like I had every right to be here, like I wasn't the girl he'd left in a hallway last night while he laughed with strangers. I let him see all of it, and I kept my face perfectly, deliberately calm.

Then I turned away.

And walked further into the room with Ryker Voss at my side.