“First, I want him to celebrate.”

Chapter 6 — He Celebrated Loudly

Roman celebrated loudly.

He always did everything loudly; it was the tell I should have read years before I married him, the way a man who is sure of himself keeps still, and a man performing sureness fills every room he enters.

Three days after my release, his engagement party to Larissa lit up the top floor of Ashby Tower — my father’s building, the one that still wore my family’s name across its face while Roman wore the company inside it like stolen skin.

The photographs were across the society pages by midnight: Roman in a white dinner jacket, Larissa draped in pearls, the two of them laughing beneath chandeliers my inheritance had paid for.