Chapter 6
She had nothing. She had a borrowed jacket and a cup of tea she couldn’t pay for.
Sophie set the tea down. Elena wrapped both hands around it and looked out the window at the rain, and for the first time in twelve years, she did not calculate how she was going to get home.
CHAPTER 3
She was on her second cup when the chair across from her scraped back.
“Rough night.”
Elena looked up. A man stood beside the booth, one hand on the back of the chair — dark-haired, dark-eyed, in an expensive suit worn loose, jacket open, tie gone, top button undone. His eyes were almost black and gave nothing away.
“That’s an understatement,” she said.
“Mind if I sit?” He didn’t move. “You look like you could use company. Or I can leave. Your call.”
There was no pressure in his voice. That was what made her notice it. She’d spent twelve years learning to hear pressure — the exact weight of a pause, the temperature of a suggestion. This man asked like he genuinely intended to walk away.
“You can sit.”
He slid in across from her. Up close he was younger than she’d first thought, and tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour.
“Dominic.”
“Elena.”
“Elena.” He said it like he was filing it. “What happened to you tonight?”
“Why do you care?”
“Maybe I don’t like watching people break alone.”
She should have said nothing. Instead it came out of her in a flood, and she couldn’t stop it.
“Bad marriage.”
“How bad?”
“The kind where you leave in the middle of his birthday party, in front of two hundred people, because if you stay one more second you’ll stop existing entirely.” Her hands were flat on the table. “The kind where he tells you you’re a placeholder. Where he parades his mistress in front of you and everyone at the table pretends not to notice. Where you wake up one morning and realize you’ve spent twelve years disappearing piece by piece and there’s almost nothing left.”
Dominic’s jaw tightened. He looked away for a second, toward the window, and when he looked back his face had settled into something harder.
“Marcus Martinez.”
Elena’s stomach dropped.
“How do you know that?”
“I was there. Different event, same hotel.” He turned his cup a quarter-turn on the saucer. “I saw you walk out. Saw the necklace.” A pause. “Saw him laugh about it after you left.”