THE BILLIONAIRE'S ANONYMOUS WIFE

CHAPTER FOUR

Elena's POV

The gala is everything I remember hating about this life chandeliers throwing too much light, laughter pitched too loud and too rehearsed, every woman's smile measured out in carats and calculation, every conversation a transaction wearing the mask of small talk.

Lucian's hand finds the small of my back the second we step out of the car onto the red carpet, cameras already detonating like a small, contained storm, a practiced, photograph-ready touch that means nothing and, infuriatingly, still manages to mean everything at once.

His palm burns warm through the thin silk of my dress, warmer than I expect, and for one traitorous second my whole body leans, just slightly, into the pressure of it before I catch myself.

I hate how much I notice that. I hate how my body remembers him even when the rest of me has learned, painstakingly, to forget.

"Smile," he murmurs against my ear, close enough that I feel his breath stir the loose hair at my temple, not looking at me, already scanning the ballroom a converted Beaux-Arts bank hall on lower Fifth Avenue, the old teller windows now stocked with champagne for whoever he needs to charm tonight, his mind three moves ahead like always.

"We're happy. Remember?"

"I remember the script," I say quietly, keeping my voice light enough to pass for playful in case anyone's listening.

Something flickers across his jaw surprise, maybe, that I talked back at all, that three years in I still have opinions about the role I'm asked to play but he doesn't answer, because a board member is already crossing the marble floor to shake his hand, his voice booming with false warmth, his wife trailing a step behind him in a dress that costs more than most people's cars.

For two hours I am exactly what I'm paid to be, though no one ever calls it that out loud, though the arrangement has never once been spoken plainly between us even after three years of living inside it.

I laugh at jokes that aren't funny. I touch his arm on cue, at the precise moments the room expects a devoted wife to touch her husband, my fingers resting lightly on his sleeve like I have every right to be there.

I watch him work the room like a chessboard he's already won a hundred times over, charm sliding off him like it costs him nothing at all, and I think about how strange it is that I know the exact tired sound he makes at midnight when no one's listening and none of these people in their diamonds and tailored suits know him at all.

They know the performance. I know the silence underneath it, even if he's never once let me close enough to touch it directly, even if the closest I've ever gotten is a door and my own hand pressed flat against the wood.

It's near the end of the night, in a quiet hallway near the coat check where the noise of the ballroom fades to a distant murmur of music and clinking glasses, that it happens.

I'm alone for a second, catching my breath against the cool wall, my feet aching inside heels I never chose for myself, wishing I could sit down somewhere no one would find me for just five minutes, when Lucian's voice reaches me from around the corner not the boardroom voice, not the charming-donor voice, but something quieter, rawer, aimed at Margo in a tone I don't think I've ever heard him use before, not once, not even in our earliest, most hopeful weeks.

"strange, honestly," he's saying.

"Getting letters. At the office. No name on them."

My whole body locks, every muscle seizing at once, my pulse suddenly loud in my own ears.

"Letters like what?" Margo asks, and I can picture her exactly, head tilted, sharp eyes narrowing the way they do when a story doesn't fit its usual shape.

"Like someone's been watching me for years," Lucian says, and there's something in his voice I've never heard directed at anything not a merger, not a rival, not even at me in three years of marriage.

Something almost like wonder, fragile and unguarded, like a man describing something he's afraid to want too much in case it disappears.

"Whoever she is, she knows things about me nobody knows. Things I've never said out loud to a single person."

My heart slams a fist against my ribs, pounding so hard I'm sure he'll hear it through the wall between us.

"Any idea who?" Margo asks.

"No." A pause, heavy enough that I can almost feel it pressing against my own chest. "But I'm going to find out. Whatever it takes. I've already got Reyes looking into it."

I press my back against the wall, my pulse roaring in my ears, half thrilled and half terrified in a way that makes no sense until it makes complete, horrifying sense all at once: the letters are working.

He's noticing. He's obsessed with a version of a woman who exists only on paper, who he's never met, who might as well be a ghost and it's me.

It's been me the entire time.

And he's about to hunt down the one honest thing I've ever given him, with the full weight of his empire and his money and his relentless, terrifying focus behind the search.

I don't have time to feel anything else, because that's when he rounds the corner and nearly collides with me, his hand shooting out instinctively to catch my shoulder before either of us can step back.

"Elena."

He holds me there, closer than he's stood to me in months, close enough that I catch his cologne and see, for one unguarded second, something raw flicker behind his eyes before the wall slams firmly back into place, the shutters dropping the way they always do.

"You heard that."

It's not a question.

I open my mouth to lie the same easy lie I've been telling for weeks, the one that comes so naturally now it barely feels like lying anymore and for the first time since I said I do three years ago, standing in a courthouse with a ring that felt too heavy for my hand, nothing comes out of me at all.

His grip on my shoulder tightens, just slightly, as if he can feel the answer forming and dissolving in the same breath.

"Elena," he says again, quieter this time, and something in the way he says my name like he's actually asking, actually waiting for me to answer terrifies me more than anything he's said to me in three years of marriage combined.