After His Mistress Framed Me, the DNA Screens Exposed Them

The second week, we started meeting in the mornings.

Massimo said it was because the light was better for reading documents, which was true, but I noticed he always had two coffees waiting on the steel table before I even texted that I was close. One black. One with cream, no sugar, exactly how I took it. I never told him that. I filed it away with the other things I wasn't supposed to notice.

That Thursday, we were going through the guest list for the gala, cross-referencing names against people who sat on the Meyer Industries board, people who could freeze Dylan out the second the truth hit the screens. I had the list in front of me, but I wasn't really reading it. My fingers had drifted up to my brow, to the thin scab there, tracing it the way you'd worry a loose thread on a sweater. I didn't decide to do it. I just realized, a few seconds in, that I was doing it, and that Massimo had gone quiet across the table.

I looked up. He wasn't looking at the list either. He was looking at my hand.

I dropped it into my lap.

He didn't say anything. He picked his pen back up and circled a name — Whitfield, third row, seat twelve — like nothing had happened. But something had shifted in the room, some pressure I couldn't name, the kind you feel in your ears before a storm breaks. He didn't ask if I was okay. He didn't tell me I didn't have to keep touching it like it still hurt. He just let the silence hold both of us for a second longer than a silence about seating charts should.

That was when I noticed his watch.

He wound it every morning. I'd seen him do it three times now, always at the start of a session, always the same small ritual — two fingers on the crown, careful, patient, like the watch might break if he rushed it. It was a plain steel thing, scratched along the band, nothing like the rest of him. Everything else about Massimo Castillo was chosen for how little it revealed. The watch was the one object in the room that looked loved.

"Whose was it?" I asked, before I could stop myself.

His hand stilled on the crown. "My mother's."

He didn't offer anything else, and I didn't ask for anything else, because I understood, suddenly and completely, that this was the same as my scar. A thing you touch because touching it is the only way you let yourself remember. I looked back down at the guest list. He looked back down at the timeline. Neither of us said a word about it again. But the quiet after that felt different than the quiet before — warmer somehow, worn soft at the edges, like a coat that had finally been broken in.

---

I found the phone on Saturday.

It was on my kitchen counter when I got home from the market, sitting next to a small black box I didn't remember ordering. I opened the box first. Inside was a security panel, sleek, unfamiliar, with a card that read *installation complete* in a technician's careless scrawl. I checked my door. There was a new keypad where my old deadbolt used to be. A camera, no bigger than a coin, tucked into the corner of my hallway ceiling, blinking a soft green light I hadn't given anyone permission to install.

Then I picked up the phone. A cheap black burner, the kind you'd buy with cash at a drugstore. One contact saved. *M.*

I called him instead of texting.

"You broke into my apartment," I said, the second he picked up.

"I upgraded your apartment." His voice was even, unbothered, like I'd asked him about the weather. "There's a difference."

"Not to me there isn't."

A pause on the line. I could hear, faintly, the sound of a city street behind him — a horn, a burst of laughter, someone else's ordinary night. "Dylan's family has resources. So does Briella, now that she knows what's coming for her. I'm not going to let either of them get to you because your old lock was rated for a college dorm room."

"You could have asked."

"You would have said no."

He wasn't wrong, and that made it worse. "Why do you care, Massimo? Really."

There was a beat of silence, longer than his usual pauses, long enough that I thought the call might have dropped. Then, flat, controlled, a door closing before I could see what was behind it: "I protect my investments."

I heard something tighten underneath the sentence, some small strain in his jaw I couldn't see but could hear anyway, the way you can hear someone grinding their teeth through a phone line. It wasn't the truth. It was the version of the truth he could afford to say out loud.

I didn't call him on it. I looked at the little green light blinking above my door, steady and quiet, like something standing guard while I slept, and I didn't tell him to take it out.

"Fine," I said instead. "Investments get updates when something changes. Text me next time."

"Understood."

I hung up first. I set the burner phone on my nightstand, next to the lamp, within reach. And that night, for the first time in three weeks, I fell asleep without checking the lock twice.