Chapter 3
She walked to the dressing table.
A velvet box sat there with a diamond tennis bracelet he had given her last month. Beside it, the keys to a Porsche she had driven exactly twice and had never once enjoyed.
She picked up her canvas duffel instead.
It was the same bag she had carried in three years ago, in a different life, on a different night. Inside were three pairs of jeans, a few shirts, sensible shoes, and a battered paperback with a cracked spine that she had read eleven times.
Nothing he had bought her.
“I packed what I came with,” she said.
Leo’s jaw tightened.
It was a microscopic movement. Anyone else in the world would have missed it, and she noticed it, and she hated herself for noticing it, for still being fluent in the language of his face when he had just told her she was a line item.
“Leave the dramatics, Natasha.” His voice had thickened by half a degree. “You’re walking out into the cold. Take the damn money.”
“No.”
He took a step toward her.
The air in the room changed. It always did when he moved like that—something gravitational, something in the body’s oldest instincts that said *large thing, dangerous thing, attend*.
“I’m not playing a game with you. I have a meeting with the Colombians in an hour. My uncle’s funeral is tomorrow. I do not have time to argue about your pride.”
“Then don’t.”
She slung the duffel over her shoulder. The canvas strap dug into her collarbone. And she looked at him—really looked, for the first time in a week, without flinching.
The dark circles under his eyes. The rigid set of his shoulders. The way he was standing with his weight forward, braced, the way men stand when they are waiting for something to break.
He was a man bracing for a war.
And she knew, with the cold clarity that had kept her alive in this world for three years, exactly what would happen if she told him.
If she said the words—*I’m pregnant, Leo. It’s yours*—he would not smile. He would not ask when. He would go quiet, and then he would start moving, and within forty-eight hours she would be inside a fortress with armed men on the door, and the child would stop being a fact about her body and start being an asset.