The Ring He Stole

Chapter 5: The Article

Rosalind's POV

I didn't hear from Kane for two days.

No cars. No cream envelopes. No message lighting up my screen in the middle of the night. I told myself it didn't matter, that I had a divorce and a career and an apartment full of someone else's leftover mugs to deal with instead. I threw myself into work harder than I had all week, staying late Tuesday just to avoid the quiet of the apartment, the lamp, the empty side of the closet still hanging open like a wound that hadn't decided whether to close.

I almost believed myself by Wednesday morning.

Then my assistant dropped a printed article on my desk without a word.

Kane Holdings CEO Risks Succession Battle Over Divorcing Executive.

Beneath the headline, a second, smaller photo insert: Kane, standing outside my building two nights ago, rain in his dark hair, looking up toward a lit fourth floor window. A quote from an unnamed board source ran beneath it, questioning his judgment, his priorities, his fitness to lead the company into its next decade.

My stomach dropped somewhere near my shoes.

They don't name you. My assistant sat down across from me, the way she did when she expected I'd need company. Just calls you a woman connected to a recent public divorce. But people will figure it out eventually. This industry's smaller than anyone likes to admit.

I read the article twice, my coffee going cold beside my keyboard. Most of it was speculation dressed up as reporting, unnamed sources, careful hedging, the kind of piece designed to raise questions without ever answering them. One line near the bottom made my throat go tight.

Sources close to the Kane family indicate the CEO's long-expected alliance with Rachel Steele, chief strategy officer at Whitfield Partners and a longtime Kane Holdings board contact, may now be in jeopardy.

Alliance.

Not engagement. Not romance. A word that belonged in a boardroom, not a love story, and somehow that made it worse, not better. I read the sentence three more times before I made myself stop.

My phone buzzed on the desk. Kane's name, finally, after two days of silence.

Have you seen it.

I'm looking at it right now. Is any of it true?

The three dots appeared, disappeared, appeared again, like he was drafting and deleting the same way I had two nights ago on my own couch.

Some of it.

I stared at those two words until my assistant reminded me I had a client call in ten minutes. I barely remembered a word of it afterward, nodding at the right pauses, agreeing to deadlines I'd have to reread later just to understand what I'd promised.

Kane called that evening instead of texting.

I need to explain something.

You could have explained two days ago. Instead you disappeared.

Those two days weren't silence. They were meetings. Lawyers. A board that wanted assurances I refused to give them. Everything printed today exists because I said no to something they've been trying to lock in for years.

Is it true, about Rachel Steele?

There's an agreement between our families. It's existed for years. I've never signed anything. I've never agreed to anything. But it exists on paper, and paper is apparently enough for a headline.

That's not the same as no.

No. It isn't.

I sat down on the edge of the couch, phone pressed hard against my ear, staring at the article on my coffee table, the newsprint photo of him looking up at my window suddenly feeling like evidence in a case I hadn't agreed to be part of.

I have a divorce I haven't even finished. A husband who won't leave me alone. And now apparently I've walked into a story that already had a woman written into it before I ever showed up.

That's not what this is.

Then tell me what it is.

Come to dinner with me. A real one. Let me explain this properly instead of over the phone.

I don't know if I trust myself to say yes to that.

Then don't decide tonight. Decide tomorrow. I'll be at the same restaurant at eight, whether you come or not.

The call ended, and I sat there a long time afterward, the article staring up at me from the coffee table, Rachel Steele's name sitting in newsprint like something I couldn't unsee. I thought about calling my mother, telling her some smaller, easier version of all of this, then thought better of it and put the phone face down instead. Outside, the city kept moving the way it always did, indifferent to the fact that my whole life had turned into a headline I hadn't agreed to be part of.

I didn't sleep well.

The next morning, my phone buzzed with a text from an unfamiliar number, a string of digits I didn't recognize, no name attached at all.

You should ask him what really happened to the last woman he almost chose over this family. Ask him before you get any further into this. — a friend

I read it three times, my coffee cup frozen halfway to my mouth, cold dread pooling somewhere beneath my ribs. Below the message sat a single attachment, a photo I hadn't asked for and suddenly wasn't sure I wanted to open.

I didn't open it.

Instead I set the phone down, opened my laptop at the kitchen counter, and typed Alexander Kane's name into a search bar along with the word engagement, then deleted that and tried fiancée, then deleted that too and simply typed his name with the word before.

The first few results were nothing, corporate profiles, a charity gala from three years back, a business magazine cover story about Kane Holdings' expansion into Southeast Asia. I scrolled past all of it, coffee going cold a second time that morning, refreshing the search with slightly different terms every time the results dried up, my kitchen slowly filling with grey morning light while I sat hunched over a screen chasing a stranger's past.

One headline near the bottom of the second page finally stopped me cold, dated four years earlier, buried under enough unrelated stories that it had clearly been meant to stay buried.

Kane Family Confirms Engagement Ended. Second Party Declines Comment.

There was no photo attached. No name given for the second party. Just three short paragraphs, vague enough to be useless, specific enough to confirm there had been someone before Rachel Steele, someone whose name had been scrubbed clean out of every article that came after, like an entire chapter of his life had been quietly edited out of the record.

I tried a different search, his name paired with hers this time, whoever she was, but every path led back to the same wall, articles that mentioned an ending without ever naming a beginning, quotes from unnamed sources who all seemed to agree on exactly one thing, that nobody wanted to talk about what had actually happened.

I sat there with my laptop glowing in the dark kitchen, the unopened photo still waiting on my phone beside it, and understood with sudden, cold clarity that whatever I'd stepped into with Alexander Kane went back much further than a wine-stained dress and a stolen ring.

My phone buzzed again. Not the unknown number this time.

Kane.

I guessed you would look.

I stared at the screen for a long moment, something between relief and unease settling into my chest, grateful at least that he hadn't pretended to some impossible omniscience, that he'd simply known me well enough after a handful of days to predict exactly what I'd do with a locked door and enough curiosity to pick at it.

Who was she, I typed back.

The reply took longer this time.

You're asking the wrong question.

Then what's the right one.

Not who she was.

A pause, the three dots blinking once, twice, before the final message came through.

What my family did after I chose her.

I read it three times, my kitchen gone completely silent around me, and realized I had absolutely no idea what I was more afraid of, the answer to that question, or how badly I already wanted to hear it.