Cheated With Four Girls

He showed up at eight in the morning.

I hadn't slept. I'd spent the night sitting on my bathroom floor with Ryker's black card pressed between my palms, turning it over and over until the edges were warm from my skin. I'd told myself a hundred times to throw it in the trash. I'd told myself a hundred times I wasn't going to that dinner.

I was still holding the card when the pounding started.

Three hard knocks. Then his voice.

"Sienna. Open the door."

Kade.

I closed my eyes. Breathed. Then I tucked the card into the pocket of my robe and went to answer it.

He looked like he hadn't slept either, but on Kade it just looked rakish—hair slightly disheveled, jaw unshaved, eyes bright with the particular energy of someone who'd been rehearsing a speech on the drive over. He was already talking before I'd fully opened the door.

"It was just a joke, Sienna! They offered, I looked, it means nothing!"

He pushed past me into the apartment, one hand raking through his hair, the other slamming flat against my kitchen counter hard enough to rattle the mugs on their hooks. The sound cracked through the morning quiet like a gunshot.

I stood by the open door for a moment. The autumn air from the hallway was cold against the back of my neck. Then I closed it, slowly, and turned around.

"You looked," I said.

"That's all I did!" He spun to face me, spreading his hands wide—that gesture he used when he wanted to look reasonable, like he was offering me something. "You're so uptight about everything, Sienna. You always have been. If you weren't so—" he stopped, recalibrated, softened his voice to something almost gentle "—so reserved all the time, maybe I wouldn't need to—"

"Don't." The word came out flat. Quiet. Steadier than I felt.

I crossed my arms over my chest without thinking, a reflex, a shield against the way his eyes were moving over me even now—assessing, cataloguing, looking for the angle that would work.

He switched tactics immediately. He always did.

"Baby." He stepped toward me, voice dropping to something low and coaxing. "Come on. You know I love you. Last night was nothing. Those girls were nothing. You're the one I came back to, aren't you?"

He reached for my wrist.

I stepped back.

His hand closed on air, and something shifted in his face—the softness curdling at the edges, the performance slipping.

"You're really going to do this?" His voice had an edge now. "Over nothing?"

"You think I'm stupid, Kade." My voice was shaking, but I didn't stop. "You didn't just look. You wanted them to make me feel like nothing."

The words came out ragged, torn from somewhere I'd been keeping sealed for a long time. I watched them land. Watched his jaw tighten.

"That's insane," he said. "That's—you're being insane right now."

He moved fast. His hand shot out and grabbed my wrist, fingers wrapping tight, the way he always did when he wanted to remind me of the difference in our sizes—casual, almost bored, like restraining me was an afterthought. He tugged me toward him.

"Stop it," he said, quiet and certain. "Stop making this into something it isn't. Come here."

I looked down at his hand on my wrist.

Then I looked at the mug of coffee on the counter beside me. Still steaming. I'd made it an hour ago and never drunk it.

I picked it up with my free hand and poured it onto the floor directly in front of his feet.

The hot liquid splashed across the tile and over the tops of his shoes. He recoiled instantly, releasing my wrist, stumbling back a half-step with a sharp curse. The mug hit the counter with a crack but didn't break.

"What the—"

"Get out." My voice didn't shake this time.

He stared at me. Coffee dripped from the hem of his trousers. His face had gone through three different expressions in the span of two seconds—shock, fury, something almost like recalculation.

Then the fury won.

"You think you can—" He started toward me again, and this time the softness was completely gone. His shoulders were up, his hands balling at his sides, and I recognized that look. I'd seen it before, always right before he said something designed to cut so deep it would take days to stop bleeding.

I didn't move. I held his gaze and I did not move.

The knock at the door stopped him cold.

Not a knock, actually. More like a single authoritative rap—the kind that didn't ask permission. We both turned.

The door opened.

Two men stepped in. Dark suits, no expression. The kind of men who didn't need to announce themselves because their presence was announcement enough. I'd never seen them before, but I recognized the quality of them—the way they moved, the way they occupied space. Ryker's men. I knew it before either of them spoke.

The first one was carrying something. A garment bag, long and black, handled with the careful precision of something irreplaceable. He crossed the apartment without looking at Kade and laid it across the back of my sofa like it was the most natural thing in the world.

The second man looked at Kade.

His voice was completely empty of inflection. "Get out. Mr. Voss's fiancée needs to get dressed."

The silence that followed was enormous.

I felt it pressing against my eardrums, felt the way the air in the room changed—thickened, charged. Kade had gone completely still. The fury had drained out of his face, replaced by something I'd never seen there before.

Fear.

His eyes moved from the bodyguard to me. Then to the garment bag on my sofa. Then back to me.

"Fiancée," he repeated. The word came out wrong, like a foreign language he'd never learned to pronounce.

I said nothing.

I kept my arms crossed and my face still and I let him stand there in his coffee-stained shoes and I said absolutely nothing at all.

The bodyguard by the door didn't move. Didn't repeat himself. Just waited, patient as stone, for Kade to do the math.

Kade's mouth opened. Closed.

He looked at me one more time—and for just a moment, beneath the shock and the fear, I saw something else flicker across his face. Something that looked almost like the beginning of understanding. Like a man who'd been playing a game suddenly realizing the board had been rearranged while he wasn't paying attention.

Then he walked out.

The door clicked shut behind him.

I exhaled.

My knees wanted to buckle. I didn't let them. I stood there in my robe in my coffee-splattered kitchen and I breathed until the shaking in my hands slowed to something manageable.

Then I turned and looked at the garment bag on my sofa.

Slowly, I crossed the room and unzipped it.

The dress inside was black. Of course it was. But it was black the way a night sky is black—not absence, but depth. The fabric caught the morning light and threw it back in fragments, and even on the hanger it looked like something designed specifically to make a room fall quiet.

Tucked into the interior pocket of the garment bag was a single strip of paper. No greeting, no signature. Just four words in sharp, angular handwriting:

*Don't forget the card.*

I reached into the pocket of my robe.

The card was still there, warm from my skin.

I stood there for a long moment, holding the dress in one hand and the card in the other, and I thought about Kade's face when he'd heard the word *fiancée*. The way the certainty had gone out of him like a light switching off.

I thought about Ryker's voice in the dark. *Let him spend the whole evening watching you and wondering when you stopped looking at him like he hung the stars.*

I hung the dress on the back of my bedroom door.

Eight o'clock. I wasn't going to be late.