POV: Lorenzo | ~1,200 words
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He deleted them all.
Isabelle. Madeline. Chloe. Sofia. A dozen other names scattered across three area codes—gone, one after another, each contact removed with the same unhurried efficiency he'd built into every other aspect of his life. It took less than ten minutes. He sat at his desk in the apartment that still smelled faintly of her shampoo and listened to the city traffic forty floors below and felt the strange, hollow absence of a habit he hadn't known was a habit until he stopped.
None of it mattered.
He'd told himself for years it was simply how things worked—the particular arithmetic of powerful men, the price of pressure and isolation and a life lived at the intersection of several dangerous industries. He'd been lying. He'd been lying to her,
