Roman didn’t say anything for a second.

Not because he didn’t have an answer.

Because if there was one thing he was learning about Vivienne Blackwell, it was that she did not hand over honesty often—and when she did, even sharpened to the point of cruelty, it deserved at least enough respect not to be stepped on immediately by the first clever thing that came to mind.

So he let the silence sit.

Let the cab hum around them. Let the wet city keep sliding by outside in ribbons of gold and black. Let her words stay where she’d put them—cleanly between them, stripped of softness, stripped of invitation, but honest all the same.

You affect my concentration.

Jesus.

He should’ve enjoyed that more than he did.

Instead, what landed first was something quieter. Warmer in a way he didn’t entirely trust.

Because for all the frost she’d wrapped around it, for all the precise little cuts and polished distance and aristocratic disdain she kept deploying like they were still enough to keep him where she wanted him—she’d told him the truth.

Not the whole truth. He wasn’t stupid enough to think that.

But a real one.

And Roman, for all his rough edges and bad habits and chronic inability to leave well enough alone, knew the difference.

His gaze stayed on her for a moment longer, tracing the controlled line of her face, the set of her mouth, the way she’d already begun rebuilding herself again even while the admission was still warm in the air.

Then, finally, he leaned back a little farther into the seat and exhaled once through his nose, slow enough to almost count as a laugh.

“Alright,” he said quietly.

No mockery.

No immediate jab.

Just that.

Then the corner of his mouth tilted.

Because of course it did.

“But for the record,” he added, voice low and dry, “if I was trying to buy access, I’d be doing a much worse job of it.”

There.

A little arrogance. A little air back in the room.

Something for her to push against if she needed it.

Roman turned his head slightly toward the window for half a beat, watching the city blur by, then looked back at her again. This time his expression had changed—not softened, exactly, but steadied into something more deliberate. Less game. More man.

“You’re wrong about one thing,” he said.

His tone stayed even. Not confrontational. Not patronizing. Just certain.

“It’s not your error alone.”

He let that settle.

Because she would hate it.

Because she needed to hear it anyway.

“You don’t get all the blame just because you’re better at narrating yourself like a hostile witness.”

That got closer to a smile now—faint, crooked, annoyingly warm around the edges.

Still Roman. Still cocky. But not careless with her.

Not now.

His hand, still resting on the leather between them where she’d placed it, stayed exactly there. He didn’t reach for her again. Didn’t test the line she’d just redrawn. That restraint cost him a little more than he’d ever admit, but he kept it anyway.

Because she’d made herself clear.

And because, somewhere in the last hour, he’d stopped wanting to win every exchange if winning meant pushing too hard.

That one was new.

He wasn’t thrilled about it.

“I don’t think this is intimacy,” he said after a beat, his voice dropping slightly.

Then, because honesty apparently had infected the back seat:

“I think it’s worse.”

His eyes held hers.

Not teasing now.

Not entirely.

“I think it’s attention.”

The word landed differently than anything else had.

Simpler.

Cleaner.

More dangerous, maybe, because it didn’t try to dress itself up as anything grander than it was.

Roman shifted just enough to angle toward her a little more fully again, one arm still loose over the back of the seat, his posture relaxed in the way hers never quite managed to be. He studied her for a second like he was piecing together a crime scene nobody else had bothered to notice.

“You notice me,” he said, almost conversationally. “I notice you.”

A small pause.

“And apparently that’s ruining both our evenings.”

Now there it was again—that dry edge, the quiet insolence, the thing in him that refused to let the moment drown under too much seriousness. He gave it back to her on purpose, like setting a weapon within reach because he knew she’d feel safer with it there.

But he didn’t let her hide behind it entirely.

Roman’s jaw shifted once, like he was thinking through whether to say the next part and deciding, against better judgment, to do it anyway.

“You being irritated with yourself,” he said, “doesn’t actually scare me.”

A beat.

“You going cold every time something gets close to mattering?”

That earned the faintest lift of one brow.

“That’s a little more interesting.”

Not cruel.

Not even really accusatory.

Just… observant in the exact way that probably made her want to throw him out of the moving cab.

Which, honestly, he’d understand.

He looked at her for another long second, then finally let his gaze drop briefly to the line of her hand at her wrist, the one she kept smoothing when she was trying to look more composed than she felt.

Clocked that too.

Of course he had.

When he spoke again, his voice had gone quieter.

Not softer.

Just closer to the truth.

“You don’t have to care which one I am tonight,” he said. “Useful or difficult. I’m not asking you to.”

He tilted his head slightly, the shadow of that crooked almost-smile returning.

“Seems like a high administrative burden.”

That got him back on safer ground again. Slightly.

Then he ruined it by being sincere one more time.

“But I’m glad you told me the honest version.”

No flourish.

No wink.

No rescue line to make it less real.

Just that.

And because he knew she’d hate him leaving it there—knew she’d need something sharper to brace against after he said something that unguarded—he gave her exactly what she needed next.

Roman’s gaze slid over her once, slow and unhurried, taking in the perfect line of her posture, the expensive composure, the mouth still just a little darker from where she’d been kissing him like she was trying to settle a score.

Then his mouth curved properly this time.

Low, smug, impossible.

“And for what it’s worth,” he said, settling back into the seat like he had all the time in the world, “you’re a pretty distracting inconvenience yourself, Blackwell.”

There.

Balance restored.

Mostly.

He let the city lights move over both of them again in shifting gold and shadow before adding, almost lazily:

“So now that we’ve established we’re both making regrettable professional errors…”

A slight glance toward her, all maddening calm and detective patience and just enough golden-retriever devotion buried under the swagger to be dangerous.

“Are you going to tell me what your father’s really protecting in that date window?”

And there he was again.

Still following the thread.

Still following her.

Like he’d already decided that for tonight, at least, wherever she was going next—

that was the case.

Attention.

God, she hated that he had chosen exactly the right word.

Not intimacy. Not attraction. Not even desire, though that was there too, ugly and bright and annoyingly difficult to extinguish once lit. Those words came with shapes people understood. Predictable shapes. Manageable ones. Attention was worse because it was cleaner. More merciless. It stripped away the easier excuses and left only the truth of it: he noticed her, and what was more unsettling still, he noticed the parts she had spent a lifetime making sure no one saw clearly enough to name.

Vivienne sat very still as the cab cut east through wet Manhattan, the city smearing itself across the windows in gold and black. Reflections came and went over Roman’s face in fragments—jaw, cheekbone, the line of his mouth when it tilted into that infuriating almost-smile. He looked loose where she was precise, rough-edged where she was polished, but there was something infuriatingly familiar in the way he held himself when he decided to tell the truth. Not softness. Never softness. Just a refusal to dress it up once he committed to it.

That, perhaps, was what made him dangerous.

Not his class. Not his role. Not even the fact that he had already become far more useful than her father had probably intended.

It was that beneath the surface differences—the money, the breeding, the rooms they had each been taught to survive—Roman moved through the world with some of the same instincts she did. Watch first. Reveal little. Use humor like a blade and detachment like a locked door. Stay impossible to corner. Make perception look casual so no one notices how much is actually being taken in.

He was not her kind of man.

Which was exactly why recognizing the similarity felt so offensive.

Her gaze stayed on the window a moment longer, watching the city flash by in rain-dulled lines. Inside the cab, the warmth had settled deeper now, close and faintly oppressive, carrying the scent of damp wool, old leather, and the ghost of Roman still too near beside her. She could feel him waiting without pressing. Could feel the question sitting there between them—what was Charles protecting, what lived inside that date window, and why had the mention of it shifted something behind her eyes quickly enough for him to catch?

Lying would have been easier with almost anyone else.

With him, it would have been pointless.

He would hear the seam in it. Track the omission. Find it later by a different route and know exactly why she had tried to bury it. Vivienne had no patience for unnecessary inefficiency, and lying to Roman had begun to feel like exactly that—wasteful. Not because she trusted him. She didn’t. Not remotely. But because he saw too cleanly for falsehood to buy her anything worth the effort.

That frightened her more than she intended to admit.

No one really ever had.

Not her father, who saw functions and outcomes and useful leverage points. Not Adrian, who saw lineage and risk management and whatever version of the family he needed preserved by morning. Not Sebastian, God knew, who saw only the shiny surfaces of other people and the ways he might bruise them to prove he existed. Men had seen pieces of her. Uses for her. Projections. Masks.

Roman saw pattern.

Worse, he saw through performance quickly enough to make it feel almost insulting.

Vivienne turned her head at last and looked at him fully. Her face was composed again, of course. It would have been unbearable otherwise. Cool mouth, steady gaze, the whole elegant architecture of control restored brick by deliberate brick. But her eyes were clearer than before. Colder, maybe. Honest in the way a blade was honest.

“You ask very unpleasant questions,” she said.

The line might have passed for flippant if not for the quiet beneath it. Roman would know better. Of course he would.

Her fingers settled lightly over the line of her knee where he had touched it earlier, more to occupy herself than for any real need. She did not fidget. She did not soften. She simply let the motion exist while she chose how much truth to hand over and in what shape.

“The date window,” she said after a beat, “catches the quarter I was born.”

There.

Even spoken plainly, the words landed with a strange internal violence. Like naming it made the suspicion more solid than she wanted it to be. Outside, a bus slid past them in a wash of reflected light, briefly flooding the cab in amber before the dark closed back in.

Vivienne held his gaze.

“It catches Camille too,” she added. “Close enough that I couldn’t dismiss it as coincidence without insulting my own intelligence.”

Her mouth thinned slightly.

“And I try not to do that unless the alternative is worse.”

Which, in this case, it might be.

She looked away again, but only briefly. Long enough to see their reflection laid over the city in the glass: her profile like cut marble, his shape beside hers broader, rougher, somehow less finished and therefore harder to predict. A strange pair. More so because he did not look out of place next to her in the dark. He should have. By every rule she had been raised with, he should have. And yet.

And yet.

“I don’t know what exactly they’re protecting yet,” she said. “But I know what that quarter suggests. Birth. Intake. Transfer. Some event filed once and buried under enough ordinary recordkeeping to disappear unless someone knew where to press.”

A faint pause.

“And my father does not spend this much effort protecting irrelevancies.”

That, if anything, was the simplest part of the equation. Charles was too efficient in his cruelty to waste this kind of architecture on sentiment. If he had legal, religious, administrative, and private channels all moving at once, then something in those records mattered in a way that could not simply be bullied back into silence if discovered.

Vivienne felt her jaw tighten and forced it to release.

“The obvious answer,” she said, “is that whatever sits inside that window threatens the story they’ve been telling for years.”

When her eyes returned to Roman, there was something harder in them now. Not because she was retreating from the truth. Because the truth was becoming more expensive the longer it sat between them.

“And if the story is about me,” she continued, “or about Camille, or about both of us—then it isn’t simply an administrative problem. It becomes structural.”

Family. Lineage. Inheritance. The shape of things men like Charles built their lives on and called stability.

She did not say all of that aloud. She didn’t need to. Not with Roman. He was irritating enough to fill in gaps correctly when given only half the map.

For one brief second, she hated him for that with a force that was almost clarifying.

Then she hated herself more, because beneath the irritation there was something else again—that reluctant recognition she kept trying to starve out. He understood certain mechanics of survival instinctively. Not because he had grown up in rooms like hers. He hadn’t. But because he knew what it was to live by reading the room faster than anyone else, to stay half-turned toward the exit, to keep enough of yourself hidden that if someone wanted to use you they’d at least have to work harder for it.

Different worlds.

Same reflexes.

The thought made her feel briefly, violently tired.

Vivienne leaned back the slightest fraction against the seat, not relaxing so much as redistributing the weight of herself. Her voice, when she spoke again, lost some of its sharpest edge—not warmth, never that, but the particular over-bright cruelty people used when they were trying to cover a bruise.

“The part I dislike,” she said, “is not that you noticed any of this.”

A small beat.

“It’s that you noticed without making me feel handled.”

That was as close to a compliment as he was going to get from her tonight, and even now it came laced with enough frost to survive its own existence. She almost wished she could take it back immediately. But again—pointless. He would know if she tried to rewrite it.

Her gaze flicked to his mouth, then up again before the movement could become anything softer than annoyance.

“Most people who see too much become unbearable about it,” she said. “You’re merely insufferable in more selective ways.”

There. Better. Something with teeth in it. Something she could live beside.

And yet the larger truth remained sitting under everything else: Roman had seen her cleanly tonight, and instead of lunging for advantage like everyone else in her life usually did, he had simply… stayed with the knowledge. Annoying. Steady. Observant. Present.

No one had ever really seen her without immediately trying to own the sightline.

No wonder it felt like threat.

No wonder it felt, in some terrible adjacent way, like relief.

Vivienne’s fingers tightened once on her own knee, then eased.

“I’m not opening the gates for you, Kessler,” she said quietly. “Don’t confuse accuracy for permission.”

Her tone was cold enough to reassert the terms. Good. She needed that. Needed him to understand that honesty from her was not surrender. Recognition was not trust. Similarity was not invitation.

But because she had already decided that lying was wasteful, she gave him the rest too.

“I do know,” she said, “that you and I arrive at the same places by different roads.”

The line sat between them, spare and exact.

“You wear yours like you were never taught to apologize for the rough edges. I was taught to sand everything down until it gleamed.”

A faint, humorless curve touched one corner of her mouth.

“Functionally, the result is not as different as it should be.”

She let that land. Let the city light catch in his face and vanish again. Let him decide what to do with the admission that, against all reason and training and instinctive disdain, she recognized something of herself in the way he moved through danger.

It was not romantic.

It was worse.

It was familiar.

Vivienne turned her head fully then, no longer half-using the window as refuge. The cab felt smaller suddenly, the space between them charged not with the heat of the bar or the taxi performance but something tighter, more dangerous. A mutual understanding neither of them had asked for and neither could now pretend not to have.

“So that’s what I think my father is protecting,” she said. “A fracture in the official version. One old enough to be buried. One personal enough to require panic.”

Her eyes stayed on Roman’s.

“And that,” she finished, voice low and glacial and honest in the most self-protective way possible, “is more than I intended to tell you tonight.”

She left it there.

No dramatic flourish. No attempt to soften the line. No coyness. Just fact. The kind she could bear because it had been delivered on her terms, in her cadence, with enough steel around it to keep it from feeling like exposure.

Still, beneath all that control, the same humiliating truth kept pulsing.

He saw her.

Not completely. Never completely. She would die before allowing that.

But cleanly enough to matter.

And that was terrifying.

Which was probably why, when she looked at him in the dim back seat of that rain-dark cab, what lived in her expression for one split second before she buried it again was not softness at all.

It was recognition.

Then it was gone.

“And now,” she said, composure settling back over her like winter over water, “you have exactly enough to be useful. Try not to become unbearable with it.”

Roman went very still after that.

Not in the tense, defensive way most men did when a woman handed them something sharp and expensive and very obviously breakable.

Still in the way a good dog might go still when he realizes someone has finally opened the right door and he’s smart enough—for once—not to charge through it like an idiot.

Which, for Roman Kessler, was real growth.

The cab kept moving east, rain-slick light dragging itself across the windows in gold and black streaks, the city outside blurring into something almost abstract. Inside, though, the space between them had narrowed into something far more precise. Warmer than it should’ve been. Quieter than either of them usually allowed. And underneath all of it, he could still feel the exact shape of what she’d just given him.

Not everything.

Never everything.

But enough.

Enough that he understood why she looked like she wanted to stab him and disappear into silk upholstery every time he noticed too much.

Enough that he understood why the word attention had landed like a threat.

Enough that when she said her father was protecting a fracture in the official version, Roman didn’t need the rest spelled out in gilded family language to know exactly how ugly that could get.

He looked at her for a long beat.

Really looked.

At the cool architecture of her face. At the line of her mouth that kept trying to flatten itself into indifference and never quite succeeding when she was tired or angry or two steps too close to the truth. At the little, microscopic shifts in her expression she probably thought no one caught because most people around her were too busy reacting to the performance to notice the seams.

He noticed the seams.

That, apparently, was the problem.

Roman let out a low breath through his nose, something not quite a laugh, not quite disbelief.

Then the corner of his mouth tilted.

Of course it did.

“Well,” he said, voice low and roughened just enough to feel like it belonged to the hour and the heat and the very bad decisions they’d both already made, “that’s deeply horrifying.”

A beat.

Then, with that same infuriating dry ease:

“So naturally I’m thrilled you picked me for the bedtime story.”

There.

A little swagger. A little golden-retriever insolence. Something to stop the whole thing from collapsing under the weight of how real it had just gotten.

Because he knew she needed that.

Knew she’d handed him something too close to the bone to let it sit there completely unbuffered.

Roman shifted in the seat—not away from her, not toward her either, just enough to settle more fully into the corner and angle himself toward her like she was still the thing worth paying attention to in the cab. Which, annoyingly for his own peace of mind, she was.

His gaze stayed on hers.

Not predatory.

Not pitying.

Just steady.

“You’re right,” he said after a second, the cockiness easing just enough for the truth underneath it to show. “That’s structural.”

No hesitation.

No softening.

He didn’t insult her by pretending otherwise.

“If they’re moving this hard over a quarter instead of a person, then whatever happened there isn’t a loose end.” His jaw shifted once. “It’s load-bearing.”

The word landed heavy and clean between them.

Because that was what families like hers were built on, wasn’t it? Stories that looked elegant from the outside and held only because no one was allowed to press on the right fault lines.

Roman knew a thing or two about structures held together by pressure and denial. He just hadn’t usually seen them upholstered in old money and custom tailoring.

He glanced out the rain-streaked window for half a second, then back to her.

“And if it’s load-bearing,” he continued, “then Charles isn’t protecting history. He’s protecting collapse.”

His tone stayed matter-of-fact.

That was the nicest thing he could do with something this ugly—tell it to her cleanly, without flinching or dressing it up like it needed to be made more palatable before she could handle it.

Because she could handle it.

That part, at least, he was no longer stupid enough to question.

The corner of his mouth tipped again when she called him insufferable in selective ways.

“Selective?” he echoed lightly. “That’s honestly the nicest thing anyone’s said to me in months.”

A pause.

Then, because he couldn’t leave a thing like that alone if you paid him:

“And here I was worried I was coming on too strong.”

He let her roll her eyes at that in advance.

Practically felt it coming.

Good.

That meant she was still here.

Still fighting. Still sharp enough to hate him properly. He found that weirdly reassuring.

Roman’s hand, still resting on the leather between them, shifted—not reaching for her this time, not pushing at whatever line she’d reestablished, but turning palm-up for a second like a silent shrug before dropping back again. Casual. Open. Not asking for anything.

That part mattered more than she probably knew.

When he spoke again, the cocky edge stayed, but it had gentled around the corners in that infuriating way he seemed incapable of controlling once he actually gave a damn.

“You don’t have to keep warning me that honesty isn’t permission,” he said.

His eyes held hers.

“I heard you the first time.”

A beat.

“And the second. And the very dramatic third.”

There.

A little bite back in it. Just enough to keep her from thinking he was going to turn into some solemn, reverent idiot because she’d trusted him with a live wire for thirty seconds.

He’d die before becoming solemn in a moving cab.

Still, the warmth didn’t leave completely.

Because the thing she’d said about him noticing without making her feel handled—that one had landed too.

More than he let show.

Roman looked at her a second too long again, then scrubbed a hand once over the back of his neck like he was trying to play off the fact that something in his chest had gone unexpectedly quiet around that line.

“Also,” he said, voice lower now, more private, “for the record…”

He tilted his head slightly, that faint almost-smile returning.

“I’m taking that as a glowing endorsement.”

The cab rolled through a red light’s reflection, painting both of them briefly in a wash of crimson and amber before the dark returned.

Roman kept looking at her.

Still.

Of course still.

Like a lost golden retriever detective who’d found the first real clue in the case and, unfortunately for everyone involved, also developed a deeply inconvenient attachment to the witness.

His expression softened by about half a degree—not enough to be called soft by anyone sane, but enough that with him, it counted.

“You know what the really annoying part is?” he asked.

He didn’t wait long enough for her to answer.

“I get what you mean.”

That sat there for a second.

Then he elaborated, because she’d hate him less if he made it practical.

“About the sanding things down until they gleam,” he said. “About learning how to make every rough edge look intentional so nobody can use it against you.”

His gaze flicked over her face again, slower now, more thoughtful.

“I just skipped the polishing and went straight to being difficult.”

There it was.

The truth, handed over in Roman’s language—half joke, half confession, rough enough not to humiliate either of them.

And because he could feel the air getting too honest again, too close to the thing neither of them was dumb enough to name cleanly tonight, he let the cocky edge slip back into place.

A survival instinct.

A flirtation.

A weapon.

Usually all three.

“So no,” he said, settling deeper into the seat with maddening ease, “I won’t become unbearable with it.”

Then his mouth curved properly.

“But I am absolutely going to become smug about being right.”

He let that land, then gave her the real answer beneath it.

Roman’s voice lowered again, less teasing now.

“You gave me enough to be useful,” he said. “That’s what I’ll be.”

A beat.

Then, with just enough warmth to make it dangerous:

“And if I get insufferable, you can always threaten me with another devastating correction in the back of a car.”

There it was.

The grin under the trench coat.

The detective with a smart mouth and no sense of self-preservation.

Still cocky. Still following her trail like he’d already decided it was his problem now too.

He tilted his head, studying her like she was still the most interesting thing in Manhattan and he was just self-aware enough to know that was terrible for him.

“Now,” he said lightly, “tell me which one you think breaks first.”

A small pause.

“The records. Your father. Or your patience.”

Vivienne’s eyes did, in fact, roll.

Slowly.
Deliberately.
With all the cold contempt of a woman who had been handed one smug line too many in a single night and had somehow still not resorted to murder.

“Congratulations,” she said, voice flat enough to frost the windows. “You remain exhausting.”

The cab moved through a wash of red and gold, light bending across the glass in blurred ribbons before slipping away again. She kept her gaze on him for only a beat longer before turning it toward the window, as though Manhattan itself were less irritating to look at than Roman Kessler when he got pleased with himself.

Deeply horrifying.

The line had been clever.

That was the problem.

Worse, it was not wrong.

Not really.

There was something grotesquely fitting about it, reducing the architecture of a family secret to something almost nursery-sized and poisonous: the kind of story handed down in whispers, cleaned up for public use, lacquered until the rot underneath looked like heritage. That was the world she had been raised in. Rooms full of silver and crystal and inherited names, all balanced over ugly things no one was supposed to say plainly. A bedtime story, if bedtime stories involved forged narratives, buried records, and the sort of men who mistook control for virtue.

Her mouth tightened.

She disliked that he had found the line so quickly.
Disliked more that part of her had appreciated it.

That, too, felt like his fault.

And his comment about her repeating the same warning three times only worsened it. Because it was true. Because she had repeated herself. Because repetition implied agitation, and agitation implied effect, and effect meant Roman had already gotten farther under her skin than was strategically acceptable.

Vivienne hated evidence most when it pointed inward.

By the time she turned back to him, whatever residual softness had threatened to linger after her last admission was gone. The temperature in her expression had dropped cleanly again. Not brittle. Not theatrical. Just exacting. The version of her most people mistook for untouchable because they had no imagination.

“You mistake persistence for charm,” she said.

A beat.

“It’s a common male defect. I assume treatable, though not in your case.”

There. Better.

Something sharp enough to restore the balance. Something dry enough to keep the air from getting any warmer than it already was in the back of that cab.

Outside, the city slid east in wet, gleaming planes. A delivery bike flashed past in a slick blur of reflective tape. Headlights moved over the interior in intervals, turning Roman’s face first gold, then shadow, then briefly gold again. The enclosed warmth of the cab seemed to press at her temples. She wanted the next part of the evening back in her control, laid out in clean lines, no improvisation left where it could breed disaster.

So she took it back.

Her gaze stayed on Roman, cool and level.

“We’re going to my building,” she said. “Not because I enjoy collecting complications, but because the front entrance solves a problem.”

No wasted movement. No performative pause. She was already a few moves ahead again, and the steadiness of that felt better than anything else had all night.

“The doorman will see us arrive together,” she continued. “That matters. If anyone felt industrious enough to keep watching after the cab left, then I want the end of the scene as clear as the beginning. You come upstairs. The building registers the conclusion everyone expects.”

Her tone made the arrangement sound almost administrative, which was likely the safest possible way to discuss an invented tryst while still carrying the residue of two very real kisses.

Then she tipped her head the slightest fraction, eyes narrowing with the cold precision of someone setting pieces into place.

“After that, I’ll take you out through the service corridor in the rear. It runs to a separate exit onto the side street. No lobby. No doorman. No visible reversal.”

There.

Clean.
Functional.
Contained.

She could feel some of the pressure in her chest ease simply by hearing the steps arranged in order.

“You can circle back to the hotel from there and pick up where you meant to start,” she said. “The concierge is still the weakest seam. If he was told not to log something he didn’t understand, then by now he’s either unnerved enough to talk or stupid enough to be led into it.”

Probably both.

Vivienne glanced toward the windshield, where rain-bright traffic kept unfurling ahead of them in soft streams of light. Her building was still a few minutes out. Enough time to think. Enough time, unfortunately, to remain seated beside him in the close dark while her body went on behaving as though the earlier tension had not been officially dismissed.

It was infuriating.

She had regained control of the conversation.
Of the plan.
Of herself, largely.

And still she could not seem to stop being aware of him.

Aware of the roughness still left in his voice. Aware of the shape of him beside her in the seat. Aware, in the most maddeningly involuntary way, that he had looked at her a second too long more than once tonight and she had noticed every single time.

That alone was grounds for resentment.

Vivienne folded one arm across herself lightly, not defensive so much as self-contained, and let her gaze cut back to him.

“And before you say something insufferable about me inviting you home,” she said, “try to remember that this is logistics, not sentiment.”

A pause.

“Though I appreciate that distinctions of quality sometimes blur when you’re excited.”

Her tone did not rise. It never had to. The line landed with polished cruelty, exactly where she wanted it.

Then, because she had no intention of leaving any part of the plan vague enough for him to improve upon, she added, “Once you’re out the back, you do not come back to the building tonight. You do not improvise. You do not decide, in one of your more heroic moods, that circling around to see whether I’ve changed my mind about anything would be charming.”

Her eyes held his.

“It wouldn’t.”

The city shifted around them again. A long block of limestone facades. Dark trees in iron guards. The glimmer of a pharmacy sign at the corner. The Upper East Side had a different kind of quiet from downtown—more curated, more expensive, as though even the night had been told to lower its voice in deference to the addresses.

Vivienne felt that familiar part of herself settle as they got closer. Home turf, technically, though she’d never had much use for the sentimental reading of that word. Still, terrain she knew. Entrances. Sight lines. Staff habits. Locks. Corridors. All the practical consolations of a space that behaved predictably.

She turned back toward Roman, expression unchanged.

“If Charles and Adrian are moving this aggressively, then we do not get another evening to waste indulging distraction,” she said. “Whatever they’re doing, they’re already too far into it.”

Distraction.

A useful word.
Broad enough to include him without having to be more specific.

Though they both knew what she meant.

Some small, treacherous part of her wanted to do the stupid thing and let the fiction they were selling tonight become something less fabricated the moment the doorman looked away. It wanted to see what happened if, for once, she stopped cutting herself back into clean lines and let the bad idea finish unfolding exactly where it was already trying to go. The instinct was selfish, humiliating, and profoundly unwise.

So naturally, she ignored it.

And perhaps because they both knew it, the next line came out flatter, colder, truer.

“You’ve had enough of my attention for one night.”

That should have sounded absolute.

It nearly did.

Only the smallest betrayal lived beneath it—an edge of irritation so fine it might have escaped most people entirely. Not irritation at him speaking, or looking, or needling his way through every layer she rebuilt. Irritation at herself for still registering him after all that. For still being able to feel the shape of his hand where it had been, the answering pressure of his mouth, the awful fact that some part of her had wanted the reaction when she put her hand on his thigh.

Vivienne looked away before the thought could settle in her face.

By the time she spoke again, the words were clipped and immaculate.

“When we get out, stay close enough to look convincing. Not theatrical. Not distant. Just enough.”

Her gaze returned to him, cold and precise.

“You managed it once already. Try not to ruin your streak.”

The cab slowed at the light, then rolled forward again. Ahead, her block emerged in softened gold—awnings dark with rain, brass catching the streetlamps, the clean geometry of old money pretending it had never been touched by anything crude.

Vivienne watched it come into view and felt the last scattered pieces of the evening arrange themselves into order.

At least externally.

Inside was another matter. Inside, she was still far more affected than she preferred, and that knowledge sat under her ribs like a splinter she could neither ignore nor remove. Roman’s stupid comment about the warnings had only proven it more cleanly than she would have liked.

Three times.

God.

She wanted to hate him for noticing.
Instead she mostly hated that he had been right.

Naturally, that made her voice colder when she spoke next.

“And Mr. Kessler,” she said, not looking at him now, watching instead as the cab pulled toward the curb outside her building, “if you’re about to say anything clever, save it for the concierge. He might be more susceptible to charm than I am.”

The taxi eased to a stop beneath the awning, the engine humming low. Through the rain-dim glass, the doorman was already visible beyond the curb—waiting, alert, exactly where she expected him to be.

Good.

Vivienne’s gaze flicked once to Roman at last, all ice and polish and lethal composure restored.

Then she reached for the door handle.

“Showtime,” she said.

Roman didn’t answer immediately.

He watched her instead.

Not the performance—though that was flawless, as always. Not the way she slid back into that cold, polished version of herself like it had never left. He watched the fraction beneath it. The part she thought she’d buried cleanly.

Three times.

Yeah. He’d clocked it.

And yeah—she hated that.

His mouth pulled, just slightly. Not enough to provoke. Just enough to exist.

“Mm,” he murmured, like he was filing the whole thing away rather than arguing it. “I’ll try to survive the loss.”

The cab slowed, the city tightening around them into something quieter, wealthier, more controlled—her territory. He felt the shift in her before he even looked at the building. She straightened differently. Sharper. Colder. Like she’d stepped back into armor that actually fit.

Made sense.

This was her ground.

Roman leaned forward just enough to hand the driver cash before she even reached for it, easy, unbothered, like it was the most natural thing in the world. No comment. No look at her for approval. Just done.

Then he sat back again, turning his head slightly toward her as she gave her final instructions.

Stay close.
Don’t be theatrical.
Don’t be distant.

He huffed, quiet—almost a laugh.

“Yeah,” he said, low. “I remember how to walk.”

But there was no bite in it. No push.

Just that same steady, irritating calm.

She called him a distraction.

Said he’d had enough of her attention.

Said it like it should’ve landed clean.

Roman tilted his head, watching her for a second longer than necessary, like he was deciding whether to call it out again.

He didn’t.

Not out here. Not with the doorman already watching, the scene already in motion.

Instead, he leaned in just slightly—not touching, not crowding—just enough that his voice stayed between them.

“Good,” he said quietly. “I was starting to think you were getting attached.”

There it was.

Light.
Easy.
Just enough edge to keep her sharp.

Then he reached past her, opening the door before she could, stepping out first like it had always been the plan.

Cold air hit him, rain-slick and clean. He turned back immediately, offering her a hand—not overly formal, not mocking. Just there.

Waiting.

Not demanding.

That was the difference.

And when she stepped out, he didn’t linger on it. Didn’t make it a moment. His hand settled lightly at the small of her back instead—exactly where it needed to be. Close enough to read. Not enough to claim.

Doberman.

Quiet. Present. Unmovable.

They crossed under the awning together, the doorman already moving, already clocking the shape of them. Roman didn’t look at him. Didn’t need to. The story was writing itself.

He stayed in step with her, matching her pace without thinking about it.

Not leading.

Not following.

Just… there.

Inside, the lobby swallowed them in warm light and marble silence. Roman’s hand dropped from her back the second it was no longer necessary. Clean. Controlled. No drag, no linger.

Like nothing had happened.

Like everything had.

He glanced at her once as they moved toward the elevators, just a flick of his eyes, something quieter behind it now.

Still cocky.

Still him.

But softer at the edges in a way he wasn’t announcing.

“You’re right about one thing,” he said under his breath, just for her.

A beat.

“You’re not easy.”

Another beat.

Then, just enough of that crooked almost-smile to exist without asking permission—

“But you’re not boring either.”

He hit the elevator button.

And then he shut up.

Because this part?

He knew better than to ruin it.