THE BILLIONAIRE KING IN DISGUISE

THE FIRST WIFE

Sera Colville — she'd kept the name, which told Cassian everything he needed to know about how she thought of the divorce — was sitting in a café on Smith Street when he found her, stirring a cappuccino she had no intention of drinking.

"You look surprised," she said, without looking up. "I would've thought Marcus flagged this meeting an hour ago."

"He did." Cassian sat across from her without being invited. "I want to know why you were on my street six weeks before I ran into a princess on the same corner."

Sera finally looked at him, and for a moment he saw the woman he'd married eight years ago — sharp, beautiful, ambitious in a way that had once looked like partnership and turned out to be something closer to appetite. "Straight to business. No 'how have you been, Sera.' No 'you look well.'"

"You look exactly the same. Calculating."

"You always did know how to charm a woman." She finally sipped the coffee, grimaced at the temperature, set it down. "I wasn't watching you, Cassian. I was watching the building. Someone paid me to."

His pulse didn't change. He'd trained it not to, years ago, in rooms far more dangerous than this one. "Who."

"I don't know his name. He paid in a way that made it clear I wasn't supposed to ask."

"You always ask. It's the one honest thing about you."

That landed. He watched it land — the small flinch she covered fast, the old wound he hadn't meant to reopen and didn't regret opening anyway. "I asked," she said. "He told me it wasn't information I wanted."

"What were you watching for?"

"You. Specifically you. Whether you left your apartment at the same time every day. Whether anyone visited. Whether—" she stopped.

"Whether what."

"Whether you'd found her yet." Sera's voice dropped, careful now in a way that unsettled him more than her usual sharpness. "He didn't say a name. He said 'the girl from the palace.' Like he already knew she'd show up before she did."

The café noise seemed to recede. Cassian sat very still.

"That's not possible," he said slowly. "I met her by accident."

"Did you." Sera's smile was thin, humorless. "Cassian, I was married to you for three years. I watched you build an empire out of timing so precise it looked like magic. You don't believe in accidents. You never did. So why is this the one thing in your life you're willing to call one?"

He had no answer for that, which frightened him more than any answer would have.

"I need the name," he said. "Whoever paid you."

"I told you, I don't have it."

"Then find it. I'll pay double whatever he gave you."

Sera studied him for a long moment, and something in her expression shifted — not warmth, exactly, but the particular honesty that only existed between people who'd once known each other completely. "You really don't know what you've walked into, do you."

"Enlighten me."

"I can't. Because I genuinely don't know either. But Cassian—" she leaned forward, and for the first time since he'd sat down, she looked afraid. "Whoever's watching you has been watching for longer than six weeks. I found three other jobs like mine, going back almost a year, all through the same intermediary. All asking about you. Your finances. Your father. Your — " she hesitated over the word, "—company. As if someone's been building a file on your entire life, waiting for the right moment to use it."

"Use it for what?"

"I don't know. But I know the name that came up once, in an email I wasn't supposed to see."

Cassian went very still. "Say it."

"Ravelle."

Luna found him that evening outside the bodega, standing under the awning exactly where he'd been the first time, like the street had assigned him a fixed point in space.

"This is either a coincidence," she said, "or you've been standing here for two days hoping I'd walk by again."

"Neither." Though the second one wasn't entirely a lie, and something in his face must have shown it, because she almost smiled. "I needed coffee."

"You've needed a lot of coffee lately."

"Only since Tuesday."

"That's when we met."

"I'm aware."

They stood there, the awning dripping the last of the day's rain onto the sidewalk between them, and Luna found herself doing something she hadn't done in months — studying a man's face for no reason except that she wanted to keep looking at it.

"I got in trouble," she said. "Because of you."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. It's the most interesting trouble I've had in six months." She pulled her coat tighter. "My father ran your face through every database he has access to. Nothing came back. Do you know how strange that is, for someone in this country?"

"I keep a low profile."

"That's not a low profile. That's a ghost." She studied him, and he let her, because there was something in the directness of her attention that he found he didn't want to deflect. "Who are you, really?"

The question landed exactly where it had landed once before, in a different chapter of a story she didn't know she was in, and Cassian felt the old, practiced answer rise in his throat — *nobody important, just a guy from Brooklyn* — and for the first time in three years, found he didn't want to say it.

"Someone who's about to ask you something reckless," he said instead.

Luna's breath caught, just slightly. "Which is?"

"Have dinner with me. Not the kind with cameras and seating charts. The kind where nobody knows either of our names."

She should have said no. She had a fiancé arriving in nine days, a father who'd already forbidden this exact conversation, and a kingdom's financial future resting on her ability to smile convincingly at a man she didn't love.

"Friday," she said. "Nine o'clock. And you're paying, because you already owe me a coffee."

She was three steps away, already smiling in a way she hadn't let herself smile in months, when Cassian's phone buzzed once against his palm.

He didn't look at it until she'd turned the corner.

M.

Found the intermediary. He didn't hire Sera. He hired six people just like her, over the last year, all watching pieces of your life.

And Cassian — the payments all trace back to the same account.

It's registered to Aurelia House.

Your own address.