NICK

The bedroom was a tomb of high-end minimalism, the air-conditioned chill pressing against the skin like a cold compress.

Lila lay beside me, her breathing still erratic, the post-coital quiet of the room already being eroded by her restless energy. Lila didn’t do silence.

Silence required a level of internal comfort she lacked, so she filled it with motion, the rustle of silk sheets, the soft friction of her skin against mine, the inevitable arrival of words.

I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling. In the technical sense, my body was satisfied. The tension had been bled out through the mechanical exertion of the last hour. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

But my mind was a different matter. It was still running, still cataloguing, still performing the cold, systematic accounting it did when I would have preferred it to rest.

I was cross-referencing everything Lila had told me over the last few hours.

Cassian Wolfe. Gay. Confirmed. He had met her at a club, allowed her into his space, and then rejected her with a clinical lack of apology. That was the first piece.

The second was the gap. The years where the Wolfe family’s second son had simply ceased to exist in the public eye.

Lila had mentioned the prison rumors, the whispers of a record scrubbed clean by his father’s lawyers. It fit. It explained the way Cassian moved; he didn’t perform a threat like a man trying to be noticed. He simply occupied it.

When he looked at me across that dinner table, it wasn’t with the heat of an ambitious rival. It was with the cold, spatial awareness of a man calculating the exact distance required to break a throat. He had learned to read rooms for survival, not for status.

The third piece was Noah.

The picture was now fully assembled in the dark of my room. Cassian Wolfe... a man with a probable criminal history and the protection of a titan... is gay, and he is currently in an arrangement with Noah Bennett that is rapidly evolving into something neither of them was prepared to name.

Beside me, Lila shifted. She was obsessed with Cassian for the same reason she was done with Noah.

Lila loses interest in anything that comes easily. Noah had been easy, transparent, adoring, and ultimately, a desert she had already mapped.

She had discarded him without a second thought. But Cassian? Cassian was a fortress that had refused her entry.

Therefore, he was her new fixation.

A thought arrived then, low and dark. It was amusing in the specific way I find things amusing, the kind of humor that makes other people uncomfortable.

What would Lila do, I wondered, if she found out the "white whale" she’s been chasing has been in the bed of the man she threw away for being pathetic?

"If you got him," I said, my voice cutting through the quiet. "What would you do?"

Lila turned her head to look at me, her hazel eyes bright in the dim light. She paused, the smile arriving slowly, the specific, jagged smile that lived in the darker parts of her.

She usually kept it managed for the sake of her public image, but she let it surface around me. She knew I didn’t flinch from it.

"Have sex with him of course," she said simply. Then, seeing the flat line of my mouth, she added, "I know you’re going to say he’s not attracted to women."

"He’s not," I said.

Lila’s smile stayed fixed. "There are ways around that. Everyone has a price, Nick. Or a weakness. There are methods for people who think they’re untouchable."

The confidence In her voice implied she had already considered those methods in some detail. It wasn’t surprising. Everyone has a dark side; mine is simply better organized.

"Is that so," I murmured.

"I’m not going to just give up," Lila insisted, sitting up slightly. "He’s... he’s the kind of thing you don’t just let go. You don’t see a man like that and just walk away because he said no once."

I said nothing. The decision was already complete. I wasn’t going to tell her about Noah. Not yet. A direct approach was a waste of material; it was too blunt.

I would give her the access instead. I would build the architecture of her own discovery. It would be considerably more satisfying to watch her realize the truth on her own than to simply hand it to her.

Lila shifted again, her tone sharpening. "I heard you had dinner with the governor. And the Wolfe family. And you didn’t tell me."

"I didn’t think it was relevant," I replied, my eyes never leaving the ceiling.

"Not relevant?" Lila’s voice rose an octave.

"Dinner with the governor and the Wolfes? Nick, are you serious? You know what that kind of access is worth in my line of work?"

"I wasn’t particularly interested in the evening," I said truthfully. "It was a professional obligation."

"You could have brought me!" she snapped, her frustration genuine. "I could have had my chance right there. I could have talked to him. So, did you meet him? What was he like? Did he say anything about the company?"

The questions arrived fast, the obsession showing its full, jagged shape. I thought about Cassian at the table. I thought about the look we had exchanged—the quiet acknowledgement of mutual distaste.

Try it, his eyes had said.

A small, Involuntary smile touched my lips. Or as close to involuntary as I allow myself to get.

"What’s that for?" Lila asked, catching the movement. "What happened? Did he say something?"

"Nothing interesting," I said, pausing for a beat. "But... I think there might be a way for you to meet him. When the opportunity comes, I’ll let you know."

Lila sat up fully, the sheets falling away as the gears of her ambition began to turn. "You can arrange that? You’re actually going to help me?"

"I’m working on a project with his family’s company," I said. "There will be occasions. When the time is right, I’ll ensure you’re in the room."

Lila was already planning. I could see it in the way her gaze turned inward. She was choosing an outfit, rehearsing an opening line, calculating the angles. "Okay," she breathed. "Yes. Tell me when. I’ll be ready."

As Lila talked about what she would wear and how she would approach him, I ran the internal construction of the plan. I wasn’t helping her "get" Cassian. That was an impossibility. The point was to put Lila in the same room as Cassian and Noah.

I wanted to see her face when she realized that Noah... her discarded, "pathetic" Noah... was the one in the bed she couldn’t reach.

I wanted to watch the smugness drain out of her. Lila’s condescension toward Noah had always been a variable I’d filed for future use. Now, the use had arrived.

There was a secondary benefit, of course. Destabilizing Noah.

The Noah who had stood outside the XUM building today was different. He was more grounded, more resistant to my presence.

He had acquired new variables, Cassian, and the pink-haired animal who had punched me.

I didn’t like this version of Noah. He was inconvenient. The familiar, collapsing Noah was easier to manage. By reintroducing Lila into his orbit while he was with Cassian, I would shatter that new-found ground.

Which brought me to the final piece of the exchange.

"In exchange," I said, my voice flat and final.

Lila paused her monologue. "For what?"

"For the introduction," I said. "I need you to look someone up. Use your resources at the agency. Use the company archives. Whatever you have."

"Who?"

"He goes by Cyan," I said. I let the name sit in the air. "I want to know if there’s any connection between him and the Wolfe family. I want his background. Who he is, where he comes from, and what he’s hiding."

Lila tilted her head. "Cyan? That’s a name? I’ve never heard of anyone—"

"Then you should search it," I said, closing the conversation.

Lila looked at me, her curiosity piqued. "Why do you want to know about a guy with a name like a crayon?"

"That’s not part of the exchange," I said, returning my gaze to the ceiling.

Lila studied me for a long moment, then shrugged. "Fine. I’ll see what I can find. If he’s in the city and he’s done anything worth noting, I’ll find him."

She lay back down, and I could tell by the quality of her silence that she was already working. Her mind was turning over the name, the puzzle of it, which was exactly what I intended.

The plan was formed. It was quiet, systematic, and inevitable. The bruise on my jaw gave a dull throb, a reminder of the pink-haired variable I was about to dissect.

I turned to Lila. The adrenaline of the plan was a low-level hum in my blood, and I found I wasn’t quite finished with the distraction.

"Again," I said, moving over her.

Lila looked surprised, her eyes wide. "Again? Nick, we’ve already gone for three rounds. I’m exhausted. My legs are actually shaking."

I stopped halfway, hovering over her. I fixed her with a cold, unblinking stare, my voice dropping into a register that was devoid of any warmth. "Should I stop then?"

Lila flinched slightly at the sudden coldness.

She looked up at me, seeing the man who didn’t care about her exhaustion, only his own requirements.

"You’re mean," she whispered, but the protest was empty. She reached up, pulling me closer and wrapping her legs around my waist, her arms locking around my neck to pull my mouth to hers.

As I inserted myself into her, she let out a sharp, jagged moan. She leaned into my ear, her breath hot and desperate. "It’s been a while since I’ve seen you this excited," she hissed, her nails digging into my shoulders.

I didn’t answer. I focused on the rhythm, the friction, and the cold, crystalline architecture of the days to come.