The Billionaire's Untouchable Ex-Wife, My Ex-Husband Wants Me Back

POV: AVA The man walked in at 3 in the morning and I knew something was going to happen. Not because of the sound of his footsteps on the linoleum, wrong for a diner that had been closed for an hour. Not because the air that followed him in from the door, cold as it was, cut through the smell of bleach and grease in the air of The Rusty Spoon. Because my hands started shaking. And my hands did not shake anymore. They hadn't since I trained out the habit; crying and hope and all the other weaknesses that had almost seen me destroyed three years ago, when Dominic Kane had slid a stack of papers in front of me on top of his mahogany desk and said, "Sign them Ava. We're done." "We're closed," I said, keeping my eyes down at the counter. If I didn't look, it wasn't real. "The kitchen's been out for an hour." The footsteps halted on the other side of the counter. "Hello, Ava." Two words. My entire reconstructed world was sent spinning and I looked up to see who he was. Dominic Kane, walking out of the sickly fluorescent light like the night had spat him out on the floor of The Rusty Spoon. Six foot three of cold, ruthless, devastating man. The suit he was wearing alone probably cost more than six months of my rent. His face, the same sharp jaw, winter grey eyes and mouth that had once told me I was the only thing keeping him breathing had not changed at all. It had hardened. As if every year of life had sucked out the softness and left behind polished steel for him. He looked at me like it was something he owned. Something he'd lost track of. I felt my stomach lurch and my chin rise on it's own, old reflexes. "Get out," I said my voice not shaking. Small mercy. "I'm not interested." His eyes swept over me, taking in the cheap polyester of my uniform, the dark rings I didn't bother trying to hide, the second hand watch making loud ticking noises on my wrist. I watched him take in every piece of evidence in the life I had been leading since he threw me out of his world. There was something flashing across his face. Gone before I could name it. "I have a proposition," he said. "I'm not interested." "Kane Industries needs a wife." I laughed, the sound coming out ugly and sharp, scraped raw from some place I usually saved it for. "Try a dating app, Dominic. I hear they have filters for cold blooded billionaire's with no soul. You'll be very popular." He didn't so much as blink. He never did. "The Voss family is making a move," he said, continuing as if I hadn't interrupted him. Like he was a man reading from a board deck. "Hostile takeover, they've flipped three of my board members already. The only play left is an alliance with the Silvans." A pause. "Which means I need to look like I have something to lose." "And you thought of me." I said, pressing my palms flat against the counter to stop them shaking. "The woman you threw away. Your idea of stable is fascinating." "You're not my first choice," he said. "You're my only option." There it is. The Dominic Kane special. No apology, no softening. Just the brutal, stripped back truth of what I was to him. A tool now that he didn't have any other. What he didn't know and never would know was that I was shaking for an entirely different reason. Because I had been waiting for this. Not him, I had burned that wanting out of myself years ago in the cold, quiet, methodical way you burn field before replanting. This. This was a door back inside his world and under the bed in the apartment I lived in, inside a locked fireproof box were things Dominic Kane didn't know I had. Photocopied files I had snuck the night his assistant had changed my building access codes. A name, Reyna Solis, written in the margin of a board meeting agenda I was never supposed to see. Proof that the story of why he ended our marriage wasn't the story I had been told. I didn't have everything yet. But I was close. And now he was giving me the key to walk right back into the middle of everything. I kept my face blank, I had practiced it for three years. "In exchange," he said, reaching into his jacket and laying a thick, cream envelope down on the counter between us, "you will receive a settlement. Fifty million dollars. Paid in full upon the dissolution of the marriage." The number didn't make my head spin the way it might have before. Instead I ran the math, same as I always did these days. Fifty million meant my boss Carla could afford the surgery her son needed. It meant I could finish what I had started. It meant I would never have to smell industrial bleach at 3 in the morning again. "There's also a clause," he said, voice lowering slightly taking on an edge. "If you are found to be working against Kane industries, or against my personal interests, in any capacity during the marriage- you forfeit the settlement. Everything. And my legal team will bury you." I stared at him. He stared back. He knows. The thought detonated in my chest before I could stop it, but no. No, if he knew I wouldn't be standing here, I would be in a courthouse. Or worse. He was just covering his own, being Dominic. He was watching me, like a chess player watches the board, looking for the move underneath the move. He thought I was considering the money. Waging a war in my chest between comfort and pride, the way the woman he had married would have. He had no idea the woman standing across from him had already made her choice. "I'll read it," I said, reaching out and picking up the envelope. The paper was heavy and expensive, warm where it had been against his chest. I hated that I noticed it. "I'm not promising anything." He nodded, the nod of a man who had already won and was simply waiting for the paperwork to confirm it and he turned towards the door. And then he stopped. His back was to me, his shoulders, those impossibly broad, always perfectly poised shoulders dropped just slightly. For just a second. "Ava," he sounded different, rough around the edges, almost human. "The night I left." He paused again. "I came back. For you." The air in my lungs turned into ice and he pushed through the door before I could form a single word of response. The bell chimed, thin and fragile, and then he was gone, swallowed up by the city dark, the black car waiting at the curb already moving. I stood there, envelope in both hands, his cologne still hanging in the air between me and where he had been. He came back. When? A week after the divorce? A month? Five minutes after the door shut on three years of my life? I pressed the envelope flat against my chest, forcing myself to breathe. It was a manipulation, obviously. The first move in a long game, softening me before I had even signed anything. Or. Or it was the one piece of truth I was missing. The one thread, if I tugged it, that might unravel everything. I watched the car disappe ar around the corner. It doesn't matter, I told myself. Stay on the plan. But the hook was in and we both knew it.