SIN SCENES

Just us?

The door to my apartment hadn't just been scrubbed; it had been entirely exorcised.

When I walked in at two o'clock, a three-man team in identical black polo shirts was already finishing up. They didn't speak to me. They didn't even look at me. They moved with the silent, terrifying efficiency of a cartel cleanup crew, except instead of dissolving bodies, they were dissolving any evidence that a sixty-year-old billionaire had spent the last three weeks treating my mid-century modern sofa like an Olympic playground.

By three o'clock, they were gone. I stood in the center of my living room, inhaling deeply. The faint, intoxicating scent of Stan’s Tom Ford sandalwood cologne was entirely missing, replaced by the aggressively sterile odor of industrial-grade linen spray. I marched into the bathroom. My spare toothbrush—the heavy, charcoal-bristled one Stan insisted on buying because he claimed my bamboo ones felt like brushing with a twig—was gone. In its place sat a brand-new, sterile white oral hygiene kit, still in the plastic wrapper.

"Immaculate," I whispered to my reflection. "If Cashe asks, I’ve suddenly developed a passion for hospital-grade cleanliness. Maybe I'm just entering my Howard Hughes era. It's a natural progression for a villain arc."

I caught sight of the bathroom trash can. The test.

My heart did a violent, erratic tap-dance against my ribs. I lunged forward, tipping the small stainless-steel bin onto the tile floor. Empty. Stan’s men had even taken the garbage. Somewhere in Manhattan, a heavily armed security guard with a security clearance higher than the Secret Service was currently disposing of a plastic stick coated in my frantic, noon-day urine. I wondered if it went into a shredder or an incinerator. Probably an incinerator. Stan wasn't the type to leave a paper trail, or a fluid trail, if he could help it.

A sudden, sharp wave of morning sickness—which was aggressively misnamed, considering it was now four in the afternoon—hit me like a physical fist. I dropped to my knees, gripping the edge of the porcelain bowl, and dry-heaved until my ribs ached.

"Great," I choked out, wiping my mouth with a towel that smelled entirely too much like a generic hotel. "Just brilliant. If I throw up on Cashe tonight, I’ll just tell him it’s an allergic reaction to his sudden return. Nothing says 'welcome home' quite like partially digested Pad See Ew."

The next four hours were a masterclass in psychological torture. I tried to look at quarterly PR reports, but the words blurred into a repeating pattern of two pink lines. Every corporate crisis in my inbox felt laughably minor compared to the biological crisis brewing in my uterus. Oh, a supply chain issue in Hamburg? Fascinating. Let me tell you about the supply chain issue in my fallopian tubes.

I spent a solid forty-five minutes trying to pick out an outfit, eventually settling on a heavy, dark green knit dress. It was tight enough to look like I was trying to be the attractive fiancé he remembered, but structured enough to completely mask any phantom bloating my brain was convinced was already happening. I stared at my silhouette in the full-length mirror. Was that a baby bump or just the two pieces of sourdough from Le Bernardin? At this point, it was a fifty-fifty shot.

At exactly eight forty-five, my phone buzzed. It wasn't the Miles Davis riff. It was a sterile, standard text tone.

Stan: The perimeter is clear. He is in the elevator. Play your part, little bird.

I stared at the screen, a chill running down my spine. The perimeter is clear. Stan was watching. Of course he was. He probably had a sniper team on the roof opposite mine or a flock of drones disguised as pigeons monitoring my building. I deleted the text, shoved the phone under a couch cushion, and forced my face into the expression of a woman who wasn't currently harboring a corporate-ending secret.

The knock on the door came at precisely eight fifty-nine.

I threw the door open, putting every ounce of my public relations training into a blinding, ecstatic smile. "Cashe!"

"Onika, darling!"

He slammed into me, throwing his arms around my waist and lifting me clean off the floor. Cashe smelled like the London rain, expensive leather, and the faint, sweet scent of the roasted almonds he always bought at the airport. He buried his face in my neck, kissing me deeply, his curls brushing against my cheek. He was warm, vibrant, and so fundamentally good that a sharp, agonizing pang of guilt sliced through my chest, nearly stealing my breath.

"Bloody hell, I missed you," he murmured, setting me down but keeping his hands firmly on my hips. He looked down at me, his hazel eyes crinkling at the corners with pure, unadulterated affection. "You look beautiful. A bit pale, perhaps—are you sure my father isn't working you to death? I swear, the man treats employees like batteries."

"Just the usual corporate grind," I said, my voice only trembling a tiny bit as I guided him into the apartment, gently removing his hands from my waist before he could somehow sense a change in my cellular structure. "You know Stan. If he isn't actively colonizing a new market or absorbing a competitor, he feels underproductive."

"Tell me about it," Cashe sighed, tossing his leather weekender bag onto the armchair. He paused, sniffing the air, his brow furrowing slightly as he looked around the room. "Blimey, did you have the place fumigated? It smells like a Swiss clinic in here. Or a very upscale dentist's office."

My stomach dropped into my shoes. My mind scrambled for a plausible lie. "Oh! Yes, actually. The building manager said there was a... a localized issue three floors down. A chemical leak or something. Preemptive strike for the whole column of apartments. You know how New York landlords are. If they can find an excuse to spray toxic chemicals into your living space, they take it."

"Right. Glad I missed the worst of it," he laughed, walking over to the kitchen island where the brown paper bags of Thai food were already waiting. "Look at you, already ordered the Pad See Ew. You really are perfect, aren't you? I was dreaming about this noodles place the entire flight over."

"I try," I said, a hollow, dark laugh escaping my throat. Perfect. If he only knew that my perfection currently involved a highly sophisticated, multi-layered conspiracy orchestrated by his own father to cover up a potential biological crossover episode.

We sat on the living room rug, using the coffee table as our dining surface just like we used to before everything went completely off the rails. Cashe ate with the enthusiasm of a man who had been trapped on a corporate jet with nothing but caviar and tiny portions of sea bass for seven hours. He talked animatedly about the London board members, the European distribution logistics, and how much he hated British television.

I forced myself to chew, swallowing tiny bites of tofu like they were live bees. Every time he looked at me with those wide, trusting eyes, I felt the phantom prick of the needle waiting for me at eight o'clock tomorrow morning. He was talking about setting a date for the wedding, floating the idea of a spring ceremony in the south of France.

"My dad thinks we should do it in June," Cashe said, wrapping a noodle around his fork. "He mentioned something about a corporate merger wrapping up in May, so his schedule would be completely clear. Can you believe that? The man plans his own son's wedding around a fiscal calendar."

"I can absolutely believe that," I muttered, taking a very large gulp of water. June. If this baby was Stan's, I'd be showing by June. In fact, I'd probably be a walking PR disaster by June.

"Oh, I almost forgot," Cashe said, wiping his hands with a napkin and reaching into his jacket pocket. "I brought you something from Mayfair. I passed this little boutique near the hotel and saw it in the window. Reminded me of you."

He slid a small, velvet-lined box across the table.

My hands shook as I opened it. Resting on the silk was a delicate, antique gold bracelet, intricately twisted into the shape of an open vine, dotted with tiny, brilliant emeralds that caught the light of my living room lamp.

"It's a vintage piece," Cashe said softly, leaning over to kiss my temple. "The jeweler said the pattern represents deep roots. Growth. Building a foundation. I thought... well, with the wedding coming up, it felt right. A family tree of our own, you know? Something solid."

A family tree.

I looked at the twisted gold vine, and all I could see was the wreath I had turned it into. The dark humor of the universe was getting aggressively heavy-handed. If the universe wanted to mock me, it could at least be a bit more subtle about it. A real, genuine tear slipped down my nose, splashing directly onto the velvet box.

"Oh, darling, don't cry," Cashe said gently, wrapping his arms around me from behind, pulling my back against his chest. He held me tightly, rocking me slightly on the floor. "I know it's been stressful with me away, and my dad being an absolute tyrant. But I'm back now. We're going to build this life together. Just you and me. No boardrooms, no corporate drama. Just us."

I pressed my eyes shut, letting him hold me, leaning into the deceptive safety of his embrace while my mind sprinted through the logistical nightmare of the next twelve hours. He was planning a future with deep roots. And tomorrow morning, I was getting into a mysterious unmarked medical vehicle to find out if the seed currently growing inside me belonged to him, or to the man who was currently watching my building from a blacked-out SUV.

"Thank you, Cashe," I whispered, clamping my jaw shut against the rising tide of nausea and existential dread. "It's... absolutely flawless."

As we finally cleaned up the takeout boxes and moved toward the bedroom, I glanced out the window into the rainy Manhattan night. Down below, parked right at the corner, a pair of slick, black headlights flickered once, then went dark. The countdown was officially at less than ten hours, and I had to figure out how to escape my own fiancé's bed without waking him up to go play Russian roulette with a syringe.

The stage is set for the fateful morning