The Muse He Never Saw

Episode 3

Six years later.*

The apartment still smelled like burnt toast from that morning's rushed breakfast, and somewhere under the couch cushions a phone was buzzing that no one had bothered to answer. Six years of small apartments and smaller budgets had taught Elena to move through mornings like this one fast and efficient, no wasted motion, no time to feel the weight of it.

"He's fine, Marisol. Look at him — happiest boy in the building." Elena crouched beside the tablet glowing on the coffee table, where her son had three windows open and something faintly suspicious loading in the background of a fourth. "Milo. Are you trying to hack into my bank account again?"

"I was going to add a zero," Milo said, not looking up, thumbs already moving to close the evidence. "For your birthday. It's basically a gift."

"Sweet. Illegal. No." She kissed the top of his head, breathing in the smell of him, still faintly like the shampoo she'd bought when he was a baby because some habits didn't die even when the budget said they should. She stood and smoothed down a blazer she'd bought secondhand two winters ago and altered herself late one night until the seams sat like they'd been tailored for her alone. "Marisol, can you watch him a little longer? I have an interview."

Marisol's eyebrows climbed halfway to her hairline. "An *interview." You. The Muse. Half this industry would trade a kidney just to have you glance at their portfolio, and you're going in for an *interview* like some nervous intern fresh out of school."

"Nobody at Kingsley Group knows the Muse is Elena Reyes," Elena said quietly, checking her reflection in the hallway mirror one last time, smoothing a wrinkle that wasn't really there. "And it's staying that way. I need this to be about work. Nothing else."

She was three blocks from the building, cutting through the lunch-hour crowd with her portfolio case hugged to her chest, when the man crashed into her.

Literally — stumbling out of an alley, one hand pressed to a split lip, eyes scanning the street behind him like it might swallow him whole at any second. Before she could react, he'd caught her by the shoulders, murmured something breathless that might have been *sorry, * and then his mouth was on hers, warm and startling and gone almost before her brain could catch up to what her body already understood.

It lasted four seconds. It felt, absurdly, like four years.

He pulled back first, chest heaving, already looking past her toward the mouth of the alley, like the danger there hadn't finished with him yet. "I don't have time to explain," he said, low and urgent. "Thank you. I'll find a way to repay you."

Then he was gone, swallowed whole by the lunch crowd, and Elena was left standing frozen on the sidewalk with her pulse doing something humiliating and a taste on her lips she couldn't quite place — familiar, somehow, in a way that made absolutely no sense for a stranger she'd known for four seconds and would likely never see again.

"Hello? *Hello?*" Marisol's voice crackled through the phone still clutched in her hand. She hadn't even realized the call had connected somewhere in the chaos. "What happened? I heard a — was that a *kiss?*"

"Some guy needed cover. He had a bruise on his face and someone was chasing him down an alley."

"Was he hot?"

"That's your question? A man just used me as a human shield."

"*Was. He. Hot.*"

Elena pressed two fingers to her still-tingling mouth and stared down the empty street where he'd vanished. "...Yeah. Very." She frowned, something snagging at the edge of memory she couldn't pull free. "He looked familiar too. I don't know why."

She didn't have time to chase the thought. Her interview started in six minutes, at a building with the Kingsley Group logo etched thirty feet high in glass — and she had absolutely no idea that the man now three blocks behind her, straightening his tie, checking his reflection in a storefront window for cameras, was walking through the private entrance of that very same building, carrying the same stubborn, placeable feeling she was.

She stood at the base of the tower a full minute before she made herself walk in, portfolio case damp under her palm. Six years she'd spent building the Muse into a name that made buyers in three countries go quiet with respect, and none of it would matter in that lobby. In there, she was only Elena Reyes — a single mother with a gap in her résumé she'd never be able to explain, walking into the one building in the city she'd sworn, six years ago, she would never set foot inside again.

She thought of Milo's face that morning, the easy trust in it, the way he never once asked why they moved so often or why she flinched at certain names in the news. He deserved better than a mother running from her own history. That was the only reason her legs kept moving toward the revolving doors instead of back toward the safety of the street.