Chapter 8
He looked up toward the bed.
The room was drowned in the pale, blue-gray gloom of the offshore fog. On the double mattress beneath the window, the heavy down comforter formed a long, motionless mound. The steady, rhythmic whisper of breathing rose and fell in the silence—slow, peaceful, untroubled by the corporate slaughter she had orchestrated before lunchtime.
Reid’s jaw tightened until the muscles in his temples throbbed like struck wires.
He had built her.
When she arrived at Sterling & Vance straight out of Ithaca, she had possessed brilliant spatial instincts and the technical discipline of a stray cat. She drew columns that couldn't support a cedar shed; she drafted glass curtain walls that would have imploded under a twenty-knot gust off Boston Harbor.
He was the one who had stayed with her until four in the morning, leaning over her drafting board, his hand resting over hers as he guided her pencil along the load-bearing axes. He was the one who had taught her to find the hidden poetry in steel tension cables, to calculate wind drift, to stare down billionaire developers who wanted to turn thirty million dollars of architectural art into generic luxury condos.
He had given her his secrets. He had given her his time.
And in return, she had fed him dandelion weeds, locked his car in a garage, and stolen his masterpiece while he played the heroic, self-sacrificing cripple on her living room sofa.
*No more.*
Reid slid the legal dossier under his arm.
He didn't care about the storm outside. He didn't care that the roads through the pine barrens were coated in black ice. He had his key fob in his palm. His laptop was resting on the cedar nightstand.
He took two silent strides toward the bed, his bare feet making no sound against the rag rug. He intended to wake her. He wanted to see her face when she realized her prisoner was standing over her on two fully functional legs, holding the proof of her treason in his hands. He wanted to watch the smug, maternal composure crumble from her features when she realized that Reid Vance was not an aging relic to be tucked away in an attic while she played master builder.
“Mercer,” he said, his voice a low, raspy gravel in the freezing dark.
The lump under the duvet did not shift.
Reid stepped closer, reaching out to grip her shoulder through the down comforter. “Wake up, Nora. The masquerade is over.”
His hand closed around the fabric.
It collapsed.
There was no shoulder beneath the wool. No warm, breathing body.
Reid froze, his fingers digging into empty feathers.
With a swift, violent jerk, he ripped the down duvet off the bed.
Beneath the covers lay two rolled bolster pillows, a wool army blanket tucked along their length to simulate the contours of a sleeping woman, and a small, battery-operated white noise machine tucked against the headboard, emitting a soft, rhythmic hiss that mimicked the cadence of human respiration.
The bed was cold. It hadn't been slept in for hours.
A sudden, prickly chill crawled up Reid’s spine, sharp as a line of ants.
He spun around, the documents rustling against his ribs.
The bedroom door stood half-open, framing a wedge of amber light spilling across the hallway floorboards from the great room.
Not the harsh white glare of the halogen fixtures. The low, flickering, orange glow of the hearth.
Reid looked down at his left hand.
Resting against the doorframe, where he had unconsciously propped it when slipping into the room, was one of his heavy aluminum crutches. The rubber tip was grey, worn from his theatrical limping across the gravel driveway yesterday afternoon.
He grabbed the crutch by its foam handle, his fingers tightening around the cold metal until his knuckles went white.
*She isn't in bed.*
*She was never in bed.*
A strange, erratic rhythm fluttered in the base of his throat—that same sickening, hollow skip that had hit him on the pier, the same tightening squeeze that had nearly dropped him to his knees by the kitchen counter this morning. His vision greyed at the margins, static flickering across his field of view like snow on an old cathode-ray tube.
Reid ignored it. He ground his molars together, drew a sharp, freezing breath through his nostrils, and stepped into the hallway.
The pine planks were ice beneath his bare soles.
He didn't limp. He didn't lean on the crutch. He held it suspended three inches off the floor like an iron pike, his strides long, measured, and soundless.
Every step stoked the furnace of his fury.
He thought of the look in her eyes by the fire when she had redrawn the load-bearing pilaster—that soft, open reverence when she told him he was the only architect in the city who understood light and time.
*An act.*
A calculated, patronizing performance designed to keep the old lion pacified while she finalized the wire transfers and client retainers. She had sat at his feet on that braided rug, looking up at him with those wide, honey-flecked eyes, while inside her satchel lay the legal instrument that ended his career.
He reached the end of the corridor.
The great room opened up before him, cavernous and shadowed beneath the soaring cedar rafters.
The storm outside had died to a sullen, dripping hush, replaced by the deep, rhythmic percussion of the Atlantic rollers breaking against the granite bluffs below. The only illumination came from the stone hearth, where a massive stump of white oak was smoldering into a bed of vermilion coals, and a single fat beeswax candle burning on the low cedar mantle.
Nora stood by the hearth.
She had changed out of her nightclothes. She wore dark, tailored wool trousers, a heavy black turtleneck that made her pale throat look impossibly long, and her scuffed leather work boots, properly laced to the ankle.
Her hair was brushed back, tied into a low, severe knot at the nape of her neck. She looked like she was about to walk onto an active industrial staging floor at seven in the morning.
In her right hand, she held a long iron poker, its tip glowing dull red from the coals.
She wasn't drafting. She wasn't reviewing contracts.
She was simply standing there, staring into the heart of the fire, her profile etched in sharp, copper relief against the dark fieldstone.
The sight of her—so quiet, so totally unbothered by the late hour or the deceit that lay between them—snapped the last thread of Reid’s iron control.
He stepped out of the hallway shadows into the amber candlelight.
He didn't announce himself with words.
He raised his right arm and let the aluminum crutch fall.
The metal shaft struck the heart-pine floorboards with a violent, reverberating *CLANG*.
The sound shattered the midnight silence of the cabin like a gunshot. The crutch bounced once, clattering against the base of the oak dining table before rolling to a stop against the wainscoting.
Reid Vance stood in the center of the room.
Six feet two inches of lean, towering fury. Both feet planted shoulder-width apart on the hardwood. His left leg, freed from the fiberglass monstrosity, was perfectly straight, bearing his full two hundred pounds of weight without a shudder, without a tremor, without the slightest hint of a torn tendon.
