Chapter 2: Poison & Champagne (4)

Afterward, lying in the dark with his arm around her and his heartbeat still too fast under her ear, Lila stares at the ceiling and thinks: I'm going to make myself so big that nobody can ever decide my fate again.

She doesn't say it out loud. It's her first secret from him.

The weeks that follow are the calm before something Lila can't name. She spends them half-awake: Kane's silences get longer, the phone calls get later, and once she finds him standing in the dark kitchen at 3 a.m., fully dressed, staring out at the city like he's saying goodbye to it.

"Can't sleep?" she asks.

"I'm practicing," he says, and when she asks for what, he only smiles and says, "For the life I'm about to start."

She assumes he means the company. She assumes it's ambition, the way he looks at the skyline.

The Sunday after, they go to a farmers' market in Brooklyn—a small, deliberate act of pretending, the way you'd go to the ocean the day before you leave it. He buys her a woven bracelet from a stall, the kind made of faded threads, and ties it onto her wrist with the same concentration he gives a term sheet.

"You'll wear this," he says. It's not a question.

"I'll wear this," she agrees, and the threads are warm from his hands, and she thinks: see, we're fine. We're fine. The fears are in my head.

She's twenty years old. She's allowed to be this wrong once.

The week after the farmers' market, Kane is present in a way he hasn't been in months.

He comes home early. He cooks—badly, enthusiastically, burning two pans in the process, and she eats every charred bite like it's a four-star tasting menu. He takes her to the top of the Empire State Building on a Tuesday night, which is the most tourist thing he's ever done in his life, and when she asks why, he says, "Because you deserve one ordinary spectacular thing before I make everything complicated."

She laughs at him. She should not have laughed. He looks at her, in the wind, with the city spread below like a circuit board he's about to rewire, and something in his face breaks and heals at the same time.

"Lil," he says. "If I ever do something that looks like I don't love you—"

"Then I'll know you're doing it for a reason," she finishes for him, because she's twenty and she's already writing the ending she wants. "And I'll wait."

He goes very still. Then he kisses her, hard and brief, like a man sealing an envelope.

"Don't wait too long," he says.

"What?"

"Nothing." He smiles, and it doesn't reach his eyes, and she's too happy to see the difference. "Come on. The elevator's cold."

⁂

The next day, in a penthouse three blocks away, Serena Blythe makes a phone call.

The voice on the other end is old and cold as glacier water. Human female confirmed. A wellspring. If Thorne won't sever her himself, we'll do it physically. You have thirty days.

Serena hangs up. She smooths her bangs in the mirror, tilts her head, and practices her smile until it's perfect.

He'll do it himself, she tells the reflection. Men always do.

⁂

Cut to Lila's phone, lying face-up on the kitchen counter of the glass apartment.

The official offer from the London exchange program is there, sitting unread in her messages.

It has been there for three days.

She hasn't opened it. She keeps meaning to. She keeps finding reasons not to—the Series A, the moving boxes, the new suit Kane bought for a press conference he says is routine. "Just a growth announcement," he told her. "Nothing to see."

She tells herself it's timing. She tells herself there's a right moment coming, a quiet one, where she can tell him about London without making it sound like a goodbye. She's started the conversation in her head seven times. Every version ends the same way: with him smiling, saying go, Lil, go—because Kane Thorne, for all his fire, has never once tried to cage her. That's the version she believes in. That's the version she's betting three days of silence on.

She'll remember that sentence later. She'll remember it word for word.

She doesn't know yet that the thirty-day clock has already started, that the man she loves is burning evidence to keep her alive, that the dessert nobody could mistake for a main course is the thing everyone in the room is actually starving for.

Somewhere across the city, at midnight, a press conference is being moved up on forty-eight hours' notice. Calls are being made from an office on the sixty-third floor. Kane Thorne's phone lights up with one last text to the girl in the glass apartment: Sleep well. Tomorrow changes everything.

She reads it three times, smiling, and goes to sleep with the unopened offer face-down on the nightstand.

She'll learn.

⁂