Caught between two Kings

Joanna POV

Four weeks after the night I barely remember and every night I can never forget, my life starts being boring again, and then not. It’s like someone flips a switch between normal and chaos.

I tell myself I’m back at work to prove I’m fine. I’m not fine. I’m tired in a way that coffee does not touch. My sketches look flat. My hand shakes when I cut fabric. I throw up once after lunch, blame the spice, laugh at myself, then lie to my friend over the phone that I’m just exhausted.

The truth is quieter. The truth waits until later.

The day Josiah shows up I am in the middle of fitting a dress for a small client, pins in my mouth, tape measure around my neck, the studio smelling like coffee and old glue. I don’t expect anyone. People who come here usually text first, or show up with an appointment. This man just walks in like he has rights.

He is not Jordan. Not even close. Younger, looser in the shoulders, a smile that lands soft and honest. He looks at everything with this curious thing, like he is reading all my bad choices and still wants to know more.

“Joanna Rivers?” he asks. He says my name like he’s testing it for weight, not like a rich man trying to sound down to earth.

“That’s me,” I say, pinning a seam. My hands are clumsy, and I don’t like how they tremble when I notice his face. “Can I help you?”

He plucks a fabric swatch with two fingers like he’s touching a new idea. “Your work has an edge. It’s raw in a good way.” He grins, disarming. “I’m Josiah Kings.”

The name drops like a rock. My head tips, a bad noise slips out of me. Kings. Of course. The city talks about them like mythology, but they move in real life too, like everyone else—just with more money and fewer feelings.

“You’re Jordan’s brother,” I say before I can stop the sound. It comes out like a question and a warning.

He shrugs, not insulted. “Yeah. I just got back to town. Thought I’d see what the city smells like now.” He laughs, not a king laugh. It is softer. “Your designs. I like the way you do collars. You make things people will wear hard.”

I want to be defensive. I want to pitch him prices, ask who he knows, tell him I am not interested in connections. Instead I find myself talking, telling him where I grew up, my stupid first attempts at sewing, my father teaching me to measure straight.

He listens, actually listens. He leans on the counter and there is an easy way about him, like a warm jacket you want to pull around you. He asks about my father, and I say his name—the thing I hardly say out loud—because some people only get to be past tense.

“My mother mentioned a Rivers,” Josiah says, half to himself. He lights up when he says it like he found a missing puzzle. “Margaret used to hire your dad for small jobs at Kings textiles. Said he had an eye. Then something happened, that’s what she said, and it got ugly.”

My skin goes cold. I hear the word ugly echo in the space between us. For a second I see my father behind a desk, tired and small, and then a ledger folded in his drawer with a name on it—Kings. I think of the last time I looked through his things, how I found a pay stub and shoved it back because grief is heavy and curiosity is dangerous.

“You know my father?” I ask, trying to sound casual. It comes out raw.

Josiah shrugs like he hates the answer and likes it at once. “Family business. Lots of stories. Sometimes the people who do the work are the ones you forget to thank.”

He pushes one of my sketches back to me. “Don’t let them forget you.” No one has ever said that about my work without wanting something. There is no transaction in his voice. Just...observation. It hits me more than the money I don’t have.

He leaves his card, not a business card with logos slammed across it, just his name and a number, like an invitation without strings. He walks out of my life calm, like he hasn’t set anything in motion and like he has no idea he did.

The week after, the nausea gets louder. I miss my period and think, at first, that stress is finally doing me in. Designers have terrifyingly unstable cycles. My body has been a mess forever. But then the food I used to love tastes like metal, and I wake up at three a.m. dizzy and sweating, and I start to worry.

I buy a test on a Tuesday because it feels like the only honest act I can do. I stand in the tiny grocery store bathroom, the fluorescent light making me look guilty, and I hold the strip like it is radioactive. My hands shake the entire way home. I wait until I am inside my apartment, lock the door because the city feels too loud, because privacy feels like a thin scarf, and then I do it.

The two lines appear like a verdict. I laugh and it is ugly and high and then I throw up in the sink and I laugh again because there is this ridiculous comedy to the timing of everything. The world is a small cruel joke sometimes, and I am the punchline.

It is Jordan’s face that floods me first, not Josiah’s. Jordan, who said “we were never anything” and “you’re a mistake,” before. Jordan, who left after the mess and gave me a terse card and a cold look. What will he want if I tell him? What will he do if I don’t? The rules in his world are not ours.

I sit on the floor, test in hand, and my phone buzzes. Of all days. My hands are shaking and I nearly drop it.

The text is from Mara, my friend and the loudest voice of ruined nights. She asks if I want to meet, do drinks, this nonsense. I almost type yes then stop. Instead I call her.

“Sheesh,” she says when she picks up. “You sound like death. Spill.”

I say nothing. How do you tell someone you might be carrying a billionaire's child, that you made a mistake that could ruin your life or remake it, that your father’s old name is tangled in the very fabric of the family who might take everything? The words do not fit into the mouth the way they should.

“Tell me,” she says finally. “Whatever it is, don’t do it alone. If you run, I’ll run with you.”

I swallow, because the idea of being brave in public is a busted thing for me. “I’m scared,” I say. “I’m really scared.”

“And call Josiah,” she says, like it is obvious. “Maybe the Kings family has more than one heart. God, I sound insane. Call him.”

I listen, and the sound of his name, Josiah, makes something open and ache in me. I do not call him. Not yet. I am not ready to let anyone see this raw.

Then my phone buzzes again, and it is not Mara. It is a message from an unknown number, short and cold and precise.

Meet me at my office, it says. Ten a.m, Monday. Come alone.

It is Jordan’s handwriting translated into pixels. For a second I cannot breathe. My stomach curls. I hold the test like proof against the world. The idea of seeing him wakes a panic in me that feels like a live thing.

Maybe he is calling me in to gloat. Maybe he has no clue. Maybe he will offer help, because billionaires do odd things sometimes. Maybe he will want control. Maybe he will take the thing I haven’t even decided belongs to me.

I stack my options like plates I can’t afford to drop. Call Josiah. Tell Mara. Burn the test in the sink. Throw my phone in the river. Move to another country. None of it feels real.

I look at the card Josiah left on my counter. His name, simple, friendly. I think of my father and his pay stubs and the ledger folded inside a drawer, and I think—if the past is tangled with the Kings, then this is not just my stupid personal disaster. This is a knot with teeth.

Monday is three days away. It is an eternity and no time at all. I should probably sleep. I do not. I sit up, test clutched in my fist like a secret, and try to plan like someone who knows what the stakes are, who has been doing the math of survival since she was a kid scraping coins for fabric.

Outside my window, the city keeps breathing, lights blink, cabs cut across puddles. Inside, my phone sits face up with his message, the letters sharp. I think about how easy it would be to run, and I think about how maybe for once I should stop running and face what’s coming.

But the truth is I’m not built for brave. I have to teach myself. I have to gasp and learn to stand.

I set the test on the bedside table, like a thing I cannot hide and cannot throw away. Then I open my laptop and look at Josiah’s number, and then at Jordan’s message, and for the first time in a long time I feel the world close around me in a way that says one thing, loud and final.

Someone else already knows I exist, and it’s not going to be small or quiet.

Monday will tell.