Chapter 3: He Left Me (1)

The last text he sent her, at eleven o'clock the night before, read: Sleep well. Tomorrow changes everything.

She'd answered with a vomiting bear and gone to sleep smiling. That was eleven hours ago.

Now it is dawn on the sixty-third floor of Aurelia Capital, and Kane Thorne cannot make himself open her contact thread.

The dossier sits on his desk instead. It is a thin folder, matte black, holding a small, perfect coffin. He has been staring at it for forty minutes. His knuckles are white.

Inside: screenshots of a chat thread between Lila Voss and Marcus Vale, the CEO of a rival shop. Late nights. A dinner in Tribeca. A wine list. A hand resting on a hand. A transfer record: twenty thousand dollars, routed into an account that bears her name. And a six-second voice memo—her voice, cool as a weather report: He's about to go broke. I'm not sinking with him.

It is flawless. It was built to be flawless.

Kane believes exactly none of it.

He finds the first crack in under a minute.

The chat screenshots are stuffed with heart-eyed emojis. Kissy faces. A whole emotional vocabulary of little red hearts. Lila Voss's entire emoji vocabulary, in two years together, consisted of one: a small green bear throwing up into a trash can. She used it for everything. Bad coffee. Bad tax code. Bad jokes. She would rather bite off her own tongue than send a heart. The girl in the screenshots does not exist.

Second: the transfer is dated March 14. March 14, Kane was under anesthesia at a Manhattan hospital while a surgeon took out his appendix. Lila slept in the chair beside the bed for three nights, her hand clamped in his, his temperature burning too hot for a man who never ran a fever in his life. She could not have been taking meetings with Marcus Vale. She could not have been anywhere but that chair.

Third: the voice memo. He plays it once, and his Duskborn hearing catches it immediately—a high, thin whine underneath her words, a synthesizer ghost-note pitched just above the range human ears can hold. Human listeners hear only Lila, cool and greedy. Kane hears the machine that built her.

He plays it twice more anyway, pressing the phone to his ear like a man listening for a heartbeat he already knows is gone.

Forged. All of it. Beautifully, expensively forged. Whoever built it had money, patience, and access to tools that ordinary liars do not carry. Whoever built it knew exactly how to wound him without ever touching the girl.

The office door opens. Serena Blythe walks in carrying two glasses of water, because Serena Blythe is never not performing, and sets one down beside the matte folder like a nurse bringing a condemned man his last meal.

"You read it," she says. Not a question.

"I read it."

"And?"

"And it's a forgery." Kane doesn't look up. "The emojis alone. You've met her. She'd send the vomiting bear at a funeral."

Serena smiles. It is the most patient smile in New York. "Maybe. It doesn't matter, Kane. It was never for you. It was never even meant to convince you."

That lands. He looks up.

"It was the prop," she says softly. "The Elders gave me the same choice they gave you. Push her away yourself, tonight, in front of every camera in midtown—make it ugly, make it final, make her run—and she lives. You don't? Then thirty days, and she doesn't make it to London. A car on the FDR. So sad. So sudden." She tilts her head, cream-colored and kind. "Nobody in your position gets to keep a human wellspring. The Keep only ever allows one way off the hook."

He wants to break her face.

He calculates instead, because that is what he does. Serena watches him try not to move, and finds it interesting, the way a cat finds a mouse's first hesitation interesting.

"You're quiet," she says. "Most men yell."

"Most men haven't done the math."

"Then do it out loud for me. I do love arithmetic."

He doesn't. He turns it over in the dark of his own skull, because saying it aloud would mean letting the walls in on it.

If he refuses—they kill her. An accident. Clean, untouchable, in a city too busy to ask. If he tells her the truth—the room is listening, the walls are listening, the air itself is listening to the Keep—then the second she is warned, the thirty-day clock shrinks to thirty seconds. They will not wait.

There is only one exit that keeps her alive.

He has to drive her away so thoroughly that the whole city watches him do it. He has to be cruel enough that the Elders believe the attachment is severed—because a severed human is worthless to them, a discarded nobody, safe to leave alone. And he has to be cruel enough that she never comes back, because if she comes back for him, they will kill her all over again.

He closes his eyes.

He thinks for thirty minutes.

He thinks of his mother, who the Keep cut off when he was small. He'd watched her get lighter by the month, quieter, until one winter she was just a woman sitting by a window—warm one year, hollow the next. Attachment was vulnerability. Deep love was the knife. His whole race knew it, and his whole race was right.