The Luna he threw away

SECRETS

SERAPHINA POV

I breathed through my nose. Once. Twice. The café kept moving around me and I kept my face still and I did what I had taught myself to do… I took the grief, folded it small, and put it somewhere it couldn't reach the rest of me.

Not now. Later. Alone.

"She lied to hold him," I said. My voice came out flat, which was what I needed it to do.

"It looks that way."

"How long has she known he's started to suspect?"

Marcus hesitated. "She probably called you within hours of the boardroom yesterday. She's been watching Sinclair Capital for months, Sera. She knew who you were the moment your name came up."

Of course she had. She'd been waiting. Not for me specifically but she had always known that the loose end of Seraphina Voss would eventually pull free.

I looked at her photo clipped to the corner of the file. At the lie she'd built and maintained for three years while I rebuilt myself from nothing.

"She's going to go to Damien before I'm ready," I said. "She'll tell him who I am, on her terms, in a way that makes me the threat."

"Most likely."

"Then I need to move first." I picked up my coffee. "I want everything she's hiding. The pregnancy lie, the fabricated messages, all of it. When the moment comes, it comes from me. On my terms. In front of everyone."

Marcus studied me. "That's a long game."

"I'm good at long games." I set my cup down. "She taught me how to play them."

That afternoon I was reviewing contracts in my suite when the knock came.

Three firm knocks. Not the hotel's pattern. Purposeful.

I closed my laptop and crossed to the door. Looked through the peephole.

Damien Voss was standing in my hallway.

My heart kicked one hard, involuntary beat and I hated it. I stood there for three full seconds, hand on the door, having a very fast and very quiet argument with myself.

Don't let him see anything.

I know.

You've been preparing for three years. Don't let a knock on a door undo it.

I know. I know. I know.

I opened the door.

He looked like he hadn't slept either. Jacket gone, sleeves rolled to the forearm, tie loosened. He was holding a folded document in one hand, and he looked at me with those dark, unreadable eyes the way he used to look at things he was trying to understand.

He had never looked at me like that when I was his wife.

I pushed that thought down before it could do anything.

"How did you find my room?" I asked.

"I own the hotel." Like it was obvious.

Of course he did.

"You could have called," I said.

"I wanted to see your face."

Something about the way he said it made my wolf go very still. I kept my expression neutral and stepped back to let him in, because asking him to talk in the hallway would have been the first sign of weakness, and I could not afford that. Not with him. Not yet.

He walked in and stopped near the center of the room, scanning it briefly, exits, positions, details. Old pack instinct. I remembered that about him. How he always clocked a room before he settled into it. How I used to find it reassuring, once, before I understood that I was just another thing he was assessing.

"I reviewed your terms," he said.

"And?"

He held up the folded document. "Counter-proposal."

I moved to take it. He didn't let go when my fingers closed around the other end. We both held it, two feet apart, and I was acutely aware of that pull…the invisible, infuriating thing between us that had absolutely no business still existing.

My wolf leaned toward him.

I told her to stop. She didn't.

He let go of the document.

I opened it and scanned the terms. He'd moved on the voting rights restructured rather than eliminated. Joint approval on acquisitions above a certain threshold. A board seat, but not the co-governance I'd demanded.

"You're offering less," I said.

"I'm offering something that works."

"For you."

"For both of us." He moved to the window, hands in his pockets, looking out at the city. The sun was low, amber light cutting across everything. "You spent two years building that position."

"Twenty-two months."

He turned at that. The precision of it surprised him I could see it land.

"Why Voss Enterprises specifically?" he asked.

The question hung between us. I looked down at the counter-proposal.

"It was a good investment," I said.

"There are better ones."

"Not for my purposes."

He was quiet. Then: "What are your purposes, Ms. Sinclair?"

I raised my eyes to his. He was watching me with an intensity that made my skin warm and my chest ache in equal measure, and I was suddenly, furiously aware of how dangerous this moment was.

Not because of the negotiation. Because of the way he was looking at me like he was genuinely trying to see me. Like the answer actually mattered.

He had never looked at me like that when I was his wife.

He was looking at me like that now, for a stranger.

Something bitter moved through me. I let it pass.

"I want to build something," I said. Which was true. Just not the whole truth.

He held my gaze a moment longer. Something in his expression shifted…quieter, almost uncertain, which was not a thing Damien Voss did.

"Dinner," he said.

"I'm sorry?.

"Have dinner with me. Tomorrow. We can negotiate properly."

I looked at him. This man who had handed me a pen on our anniversary. Who had believed a lie about me without a single question. Who had said I never wanted this with his eyes empty and his phone already in his hand.

And whose eyes were doing something to my heartbeat that they had absolutely no right to do anymore.

"I'll think about it," I said.

He moved toward the door. Paused at the threshold without turning around.

"You're not what I expected," he said. Quiet. Almost to himself.

"People rarely are," I said. "When you don't bother to look."

He left.

I stood in the center of the room for a long moment. Then I pressed my palm flat against my chest, as if I could push it back down… the ache, the anger, the grief, all of it tangled up together in a knot I couldn't separate.

My wolf made a sound I hadn't heard from her in three years.

Longing.

Stop it, I told her.

She didn't stop.

I thought about the bathroom floor in Crestfield. The thing I had carried alone and lost alone and never spoken about to anyone. I thought about all the careful, deliberate work of becoming Ava Sinclair, of building something out of nothing, of turning grief into strategy.

I could not afford to feel this.

I would not let him cost me twice.

I was getting ready for bed when my phone lit up.

Unknown number. Different from before. But I knew.

Enjoy tonight? He never looked at you like that when you were his wife.

Careful, Seraphina. The closer you get to him, the more I have to lose. And I will burn everything down before I let you take what's mine. Everything.

Including your secrets.

I read it twice.

The first time, something cold moved through me that particular fear that comes not from a threat itself but from realizing how closely someone has been watching you.

She had seen him come to my room. She knew what had passed between us. She had been there, somewhere, in the dark, the whole time.

The second time I read it, the cold became something sharper.

She'd used my real name.

Seraphina.

Not Ava. Not Ms. Sinclair. Seraphina.

She was done waiting. And she wanted me to know it.

I took a screenshot. Sent it to Marcus with three words: She's moving fast.

Then I set my phone face-down on the nightstand and stood at the window in the dark, looking out at the city, at the Voss tower with its logo cutting into the sky.

Three years, I thought. I did not come back after three years to be undone by a woman who built her entire life on a lie.

I had buried harder things than Celeste Mourne.

I pressed my hand to the cold glass and let myself feel the fear for exactly as long as it was useful.

Then I put it away.

Tomorrow, I had a dinner to decided about.