The SUV smelled like leather and something expensive—cedar, maybe, or money, or both. I pressed myself against the passenger door as we pulled out of the lot, watching the hotel shrink in the side mirror, watching Liam's figure appear at the entrance, his arm raised, his mouth moving in words I couldn't hear but could absolutely guess.

The stranger—he hadn't told me his name yet—didn't look back once.

"Seatbelt," he said.

I pulled it across my chest on autopilot. My hands were shaking.

We were two blocks away before I found my voice.

"Who are you?"

"I'm Kade Covington," he said, accelerating out of the parking lot as Liam's screaming voice echoed behind us. "And your ex just lost a hundred-million-dollar deal because he was too busy sexting minors—allegedly. You're welcome."

My head snapped toward him. "Minors?"

His knuckles—scarred, like he'd punched walls or walls had punched back—tightened on the steering wheel until the leather creaked under his grip. He let the silence stretch for exactly one beat.

"Nineteen. Legal." He said it flat, like he was reading from a file. "But morally bankrupt? Absolutely."

I turned back to the windshield. The city streaked past in amber and white, headlights blurring at the edges. My chest felt like someone had reached in and rearranged everything without asking.

"You were watching him," I said. It wasn't a question.

"I was watching the situation."

"There's a difference?"

He didn't answer that.

---

He took me to a diner called Blue Plate, the kind with vinyl booths and fluorescent lights that made everyone look slightly unwell. It was open past midnight and almost empty. A waitress with a long silver braid brought coffee without being asked and slid a laminated menu across the table.

"Eat something," Kade said.

"I'm not hungry."

"That's not what I asked."

I looked up at him across the table. Up close, he was harder to dismiss—not handsome in the soft, curated way Liam was, but structured. Angular. Like something built to withstand pressure. The grey eyes I'd noticed in the parking lot were even more unsettling now, pale and steady in a way that made me feel like he was reading subtitles I wasn't aware I was broadcasting.

I ordered fries because they were the first thing my eyes landed on. He ordered black coffee and nothing else, and then he watched me like a man waiting for a variable to do something interesting.

The fries came. I ate three of them mechanically, and then my eyes filled up without any warning and I hated myself for it—hated the timing, hated that I was sitting across from a stranger while my mascara found the nearest exit.

I pressed the back of my hand to my cheek. "Sorry. I know this is—"

"Stop apologizing for tears, Sloane." His voice was even. Not gentle, exactly. More like firm in a way that felt oddly steadying. "He made you feel small. That's his crime. Don't make it yours."

A sound came out of me. Not quite a laugh, not quite a sob. Somewhere in between, scraped out from a place I didn't usually let people see.

"Easy for you to say." I wrapped both hands around my coffee mug. "You've probably never felt ugly a day in your life."

Something shifted in his expression. Not the practiced sympathy I'd been bracing for. Something darker and more honest.

"You have no idea what I see when I look at you."

The way he said it—quiet, direct, carrying some weight I couldn't place—made the air in the diner feel different. I didn't know what to do with it, so I ate another fry and looked out the window at the empty street.

He didn't try to fill the silence. Didn't offer platitudes or reach across the table to pat my hand. He just sat there drinking his coffee, letting me fall apart at my own pace, and somehow that was both the kindest and most unnerving thing anyone had done for me all night.

"How do you know Liam?" I asked eventually.

"Professionally."

"That's not an answer."

"No." He set his mug down. "It's not."

I studied him. The scar on his right knuckle. The way he sat like he was used to rooms adjusting to him rather than the other way around. "The hundred-million-dollar deal," I said. "That's yours."

He didn't confirm it. But he didn't deny it either, and I'd spent a year watching Liam negotiate—I knew what deliberate silence looked like in a man who was winning.

"He was going to take something from you," I said. "And now he can't."

Kade looked at me for a long moment. "Now he can't."

I pushed the fries away. Outside, a cab rolled through the intersection, its light cutting across the window and disappearing. Mackenzie's voice was still looping somewhere in the back of my head—*Liam, show me yours first*—and I thought about the way she'd stood near the bar with her eyes already shaped into the right kind of sorrow, already positioning herself as something sympathetic.

"What do you want from me?" I asked.

He tilted his head slightly, like the question amused him in a way he wasn't going to show. "Right now? Nothing. Eat your fries."

---

He drove me home at 1 a.m. My building was on the corner of Waverly and Ninth, a walk-up that cost more than it should because of the neighborhood and a landlord who knew it. Kade pulled to the curb and left the engine running.

I had my hand on the door when he reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and held out a card. Plain. Black. A phone number and just his name.

"Call me when you want to destroy him," he said.

I took it. Looked at it. "And if I don't?"

"You will."

I got out. I didn't look back—I could feel the headlights on me as I climbed the front steps—and I didn't let myself exhale until I heard the SUV pull away and disappear around the corner.

My apartment was dark and quiet and small in a way it had never bothered me before tonight.

I sat on the edge of the bed without turning on the lights. Found my phone in my bag. Forty-seven messages from Liam—I didn't open a single one, just watched the notification number like it was something alive—and one voicemail from my mother that I wasn't ready for.

Then I saw the text.

Unknown number. Sent at 11:58 p.m., right around the time I'd been standing in a cold parking lot trying to remember how to breathe.

*I know what he did to you. I can prove it. Meet me at The Velvet Rope. Tomorrow. 9pm. Don't tell anyone.*

I stared at it.

Then I scrolled up—old instinct—checking for context, for any foothold. Nothing. Just the message, sitting there clean and deliberate against the dark of my screen.

My thumb hovered.

Because I recognized the name. My phone had auto-populated it from somewhere, some old contact buried in a corner of a life that was apparently not as finished as I'd believed.

One of the four girls from the video.

She'd texted me.

I sat there in the dark, the card Kade had given me still pressed between two fingers, my heart hammering against my ribs like it already knew—whatever she had to say was going to change everything.

The Velvet Rope was the kind of bar that tried too hard—exposed brick, Edison bulbs, a cocktail menu written in cursive on a chalkboard nobody could actually read. I arrived seven minutes early and took a booth in the back corner, facing the door, because apparently one night with Kade Covington had already changed how I moved through rooms.

Maya was already there.

I almost didn't recognize her. The girl from the video—the one I'd glimpsed for maybe four seconds before I'd forced myself to look away—had looked effortless. Camera-ready. The kind of pretty that made you feel like you'd been assembled incorrectly.

The girl across the booth from me now had mascara tracking down both cheeks like black rivers, her hair pulled into a knot that was coming undone, her hands wrapped around a glass of water she hadn't touched. She was still prettier than me. That was the first thing my brain served up, and I hated myself for it.

I pushed the napkins toward her. "Maya. Breathe."

She grabbed two of them, pressed them under her eyes, and laughed in a way that sounded nothing like laughing. "Sorry. I told myself I wasn't going to do this."

"It's fine."

"It's not." She set the napkins down. Her fingers were trembling, I noticed—the kind of fine tremor you can't control, the kind that comes from holding something in for too long. She turned her phone face-up on the table and slid it toward me.

Liam's text thread. I recognized the contact name before I could stop myself.

"He recorded us," she said. "Without asking. Without telling me. I didn't find out until last week when someone sent me a screenshot." She pressed her lips together. "He has a whole folder, Sloane. I've seen it. There are *dozens* of us."

The noise in the bar seemed to drop away.

I looked at the phone. At the thread. At the timestamp on the last message Liam had sent her—three weeks ago, while we were still together, while I was wearing the midnight blue dress he'd picked out and believing every single word he said.

I set the phone down carefully. Like it was something that could detonate.

"Tell me about the folder."

Maya exhaled, unsteady. She'd clearly rehearsed this part, but the rehearsal was falling apart in real time. "He has a private Snapchat. Not the one his friends know about. A separate one. He uses it to—" She stopped. Swallowed. "He rates us. The girls. Like a ranking system. Sends screenshots to someone, I don't know who. Maybe multiple people." Her voice dropped. "The folder is labeled 'Collection.'"

Something cold moved through my chest and kept moving.

"He told me I was special," she continued, and the bitterness in it was so raw it almost hurt to hear. "That I was different from the others. That what we had was—" She cut herself off with a short, hollow sound. "And then I found out he ranked me third. *Third*. Behind a girl who is literally an Instagram model with two million followers. I mean—" She pressed her fingers to her mouth. "What does that even mean? What was the *criteria*?"

Despite everything, despite the cold thing still spreading through my ribcage, I heard myself ask it.

"What was I ranked?"

Maya's face changed. The bitterness dissolved into something softer and worse—something that looked a lot like pity.

"You don't want to know."

I did want to know. I absolutely did not want to know. Both things were true simultaneously, and I sat with them for exactly three seconds before I nodded once and looked away.

Right. Okay.

I'd spent a year rearranging my life around a man who had me filed away in a folder called *Collection* and had given me a number. I'd worn the dress he picked out. I'd defended him to my mother. I'd stood in that ballroom and felt uglier than I'd ever felt in my life, and apparently that was—what? Justified? Accurate? Was that what he'd been thinking every time he looked at me?

The cold in my chest crystallized into something harder.

Maya was talking again—something about the other girls, about whether any of them had gone to the police, about the screenshot she'd received and who might have sent it—but I was only catching pieces of it because the bar's front door had just opened, and the man who walked in moved like he owned the ambient lighting.

Kade.

He scanned the room once. Found me in under two seconds, like he'd already mapped where I'd be sitting. His grey eyes didn't waver.

Beside me, Maya made a sound.

"Oh god." Her voice dropped to something barely above a whisper. "That's Kade Covington."

"I know."

"He's—" She seemed to be struggling with her next words, like she had several options and none of them were adequate. "He's Liam's *nightmare*. Half the city is scared of him." She turned to look at me, and her expression had shifted into something I couldn't quite read—part alarm, part something almost like awe. "Why is he looking at you like that?"

Like what, I almost asked. But I didn't, because he was already crossing the room, threading between tables without touching a single chair, and the answer was arriving in real time.

He pulled out the chair on my side of the booth and sat down so close that his thigh pressed against mine under the table. Not accidental. Nothing about Kade Covington was accidental.

"We need to talk," he said. "Alone. Now."

Maya was already gathering her phone and her jacket, reading the room with the instincts of someone who'd learned early that certain conversations weren't meant to include her. She caught my eye once—a look that held about six different questions she didn't have time to ask—and then she was gone, slipping out through the bar's front door and leaving the two of us in the back corner booth with the noise of the room pressing in around us.

Kade didn't move away. The warmth of his leg against mine was steady and deliberate, and I was acutely aware of it in a way that irritated me.

"You could have called," I said.

"I could have." His hand settled on my knee, light but certain, and I felt my whole body go still. "But I needed to see your face for this."

I looked at him. The scar on his knuckle. The grey eyes that didn't give anything away for free.

"I have a proposal," he murmured. His voice was low enough that it didn't carry past our table, but the words landed with the weight of something much louder. "Marry me. Six months. I'll give you everything you need to bury Liam—the evidence, the lawyers, the platform." A pause. "And all you have to do is wear my ring."

The bar kept moving around us. Someone laughed across the room. A glass clinked.

"And share my bed," he finished.

I stared at him.

His expression didn't change. Patient. Almost like he'd already calculated this exact moment and found the outcome inevitable.

I thought about the folder. About the number I hadn't let Maya say out loud. About Liam's voice in the parking lot—*don't make this into something it's not*—and the midnight blue dress hanging on the back of my closet door.

The cold thing in my chest had an edge now.

"Tell me what you get out of it," I said.