POV: Xavier
I see you.
The truth, once spoken, became a ghost that haunted his every silent moment. It lingered in the air of his penthouse, echoed in the quiet of his car, and whispered behind the relentless hum of his thoughts. He had carved out a piece of his soul and handed it to her in the moonlight, and the vulnerability felt like a catastrophic systems failure.
Admitting it was a defeat. Not to her, but to himself. This was a defeat to the meticulously constructed persona of Xavier Hale, a man governed by logic and immune to the chaos of feeling. That man would never have confessed such a thing. That man would have maintained a safe, professional distance. That man was gone, and the one left in his place felt dangerously exposed.
So, he retreated. The oldest strategy in his arse
