Chapter Eight KAI'S POV
1044 Words
The West Village apartment was clean, quiet, and completely unprepared for a woman moving in.
I'd had it stocked with basics after Derek suggested it this morning, but basics meant food and toiletries, not the particular chaos of Isla unpacking two bags onto every available surface within twenty minutes of arriving.
She put a candle on the kitchen counter. Then moved it to the windowsill. Then back to the counter.
I watched this from the couch and said nothing.
"The light's better here," she said, without turning around.
"Sure."
She finally left the candle on the counter and turned to face the living room with her hands on her hips, assessing it the way she'd assessed the hotel construction site. Professional habit. "This place has good bones."
"I've had it three years. Never stayed here more than a week at a time."
"It shows." She said it without cruelty. "It doesn't have a personality yet."
"You can fix that. Apparently that's what you do."
She looked at me then, and something in her expression relaxed slightly. The first time since city hall that she didn't look like she was bracing for the next thing to go wrong. "Marco wants dinner tonight."
"I know. He called me directly ten minutes after you hung up."
"What did he say?"
"Things I won't repeat with Nadia in the next room." I stood. "I told him seven o'clock. There's a place on Hudson he likes. Neutral ground."
Isla nodded slowly. "He's not wrong to be angry."
"I know."
"You should have told him. Before. About how you felt."
"I made him a promise."
"Five years ago." She crossed her arms. "People renegotiate promises, Kai. You could have talked to him."
"Marco doesn't negotiate. You know that."
"So instead you said nothing and married his sister in secret." She raised an eyebrow. "Tactically sound."
I almost smiled. "The circumstances were unusual."
"That's one word for it." She sat on the arm of the chair across from me. "We need ground rules. If we're living together, even temporarily, we need to know what this actually is."
I sat back down. "Go ahead."
"The marriage is legal but the situation is practical. You get the inheritance, I get the protection. That's the deal." She held up a finger. "But we're also spending a lot of time together, in the same space, and last night happened, so we need to be honest about what the boundaries are before things get messy."
"What are you proposing?"
"Honesty. If something is happening between us, we say it out loud instead of pretending. If one of us wants to stop, we say that too." She met my eyes. "No more five years of silence."
"Agreed."
"And Marco doesn't get to dictate what we do. I love him but he doesn't have a vote in my marriage."
"Also agreed."
She studied me for a moment. "You're being very reasonable."
"You sound surprised."
"You've spent five years being completely unreasonable by refusing to acknowledge I existed."
"I acknowledged you."
"Polite nods, Kai. For five years."
"I was maintaining distance."
"You were driving me insane." She said it plainly, no heat behind it, just fact. "I spent three years thinking you didn't like me. Nadia kept saying otherwise and I thought she was being kind."
The idea that she'd spent years thinking I didn't like her settled in my chest uncomfortably. "I'm sorry."
"I'm not looking for an apology. I'm establishing a baseline." She uncrossed her arms. "We both wasted a lot of time. I'd rather not waste more."
"Then we won't."
She nodded once, like something had been settled. Then she looked around the apartment again. "Which room is mine?"
"There are two bedrooms. Take the one at the end of the hall. It has better light in the morning."
"How do you know that if you've never stayed here?"
"I noticed it when I bought the place and thought it was the kind of thing you'd appreciate."
She went still.
"You've been here before?"
"Once. Two years ago. I was considering selling it and decided not to." I kept my voice even. "Go look at the room."
She disappeared down the hall. I heard the door open, then quiet.
She came back two minutes later with an unreadable expression. "There's a plant in there."
"The building manager waters it."
"You kept a plant alive in an apartment you never use."
"The building manager keeps the plant alive. I just didn't get rid of it."
"Why not?"
I looked at her directly. "Because it seemed like something you'd want in a room."
The silence between us was different from the ones at city hall or on her apartment steps. Those had been heavy with logistics and fear. This one was quieter.
"Kai."
"You wanted honesty," I said. "There it is."
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she went back to the kitchen and moved the candle one final time, settling it on the small table by the window where the afternoon light hit it directly.
"Dinner is at seven," she said.
"Seven."
"And you're not allowed to be cold and silent the whole time. Marco will interpret it as guilt."
"I am guilty."
"Of what specifically?"
"Marrying you without asking his permission first."
"You didn't need his permission."
"No. But I should have had the conversation with him years ago and I didn't." I picked up my phone. "I'll handle Marco tonight."
"We'll handle Marco tonight." She corrected it without hesitation. "That's how this works now. We're on the same side."
I looked up at her.
Five years of careful distance, of polite nods and deliberate absence, and she was standing in my kitchen moving a candle around and telling me we were on the same side like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
"Same side," I said.
She picked up her phone. "I'm going to shower and change. Try not to plan anything else without telling me."
"No promises."
She pointed at me on her way down the hall. "Ground rules, Westbrook."
I waited until I heard the bathroom door close.
Then I texted Derek: Run everything on Crane by end of day. And find out where Brandon Mitchell is.
- Writer
