You Broke Me, He Bought Me

The call connected on the second ring.

I wasn't expecting her voice.

I wasn't expecting anyone's voice except his.

"Find Rowan?" A lazy, almost amused lilt. The kind of voice that belonged to someone freshly awake, tangled in expensive sheets. "He's in the shower."

The world didn't stop. That was the strange part. The city kept humming outside my window, taxis honking six floors below, someone's coffee maker gurgling in the break room down the hall. Everything kept moving while something inside my chest simply... cracked.

My nail broke the skin of my palm before I even realized I'd made a fist. A single bead of blood welled up, bright and small. I stared at it. Swallowed the sourness climbing my throat.

"I see," I said. My own voice surprised me — steady, almost polite. "I'll call back."

I hung up before she could say anything else.

Sienna Voss. I didn't need an introduction. The whole city knew her name. Model, socialite, the kind of woman who existed in glossy magazine spreads and Rowan Blackwell's orbit for years before I ever stumbled into it. I'd told myself she was history. I'd believed it, or tried to, the way you try to believe a scar has fully healed until you press it and feel the ache underneath.

He was in the shower.

In our penthouse.

I set my phone face-down on my desk and pressed both palms flat against the cool surface, breathing through my nose the way my therapist once taught me. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. It didn't work. It never actually worked. It just gave my hands something to do while my mind ran the numbers — three years, two months, seventeen days of being Rowan Blackwell's personal assistant, and the last eight months of being something he'd never once put a name to.

My phone lit up. His name on the screen.

I let it ring twice before I answered.

"Ivy." No preamble. That was Rowan — he treated words like currency, spent them only when necessary. "I need you to come by the penthouse tonight. Pack your things from the guest room."

The guest room. That was what we were calling it now.

"Pack them where?" I asked.

"Wherever you keep your things. A storage unit. Your sister's place." A pause, and in that pause I heard something that might have been discomfort, or might have been nothing at all. With Rowan, it was impossible to tell. "Sienna doesn't like the smell of cheap perfume in the penthouse."

The words landed like a slap, flat and precise.

*Cheap perfume.*

I'd bought that bottle at a department store counter three Christmases ago, because Rowan had once, exactly once, leaned close to my neck in an elevator and said *that's nice* in a voice so low I'd almost convinced myself I'd imagined it. I'd worn it every day since.

Cheap.

"Don't worry, Rowan." My voice came out quieter than I intended, but cleaner. Sharper.