You Broke Me, He Bought Me

I said no.

The word came out steadier than I felt, which was something. I took a step back from the Rolls-Royce, rain hammering my shoulders, and shook my head once at the man in the window.

"I'm fine," I said, even though my blazer was soaked through and my heel had nearly given out on the wet pavement and I was approximately thirty seconds from crying in public for the first time in three years.

The dark eyes held mine for a moment. He didn't push. The window rose, slow and smooth, and the car stayed at the curb as I walked away.

I didn't look back.

---

The penthouse villa sat at the end of a private drive, hidden behind a wall of sculpted hedges that Rowan's groundskeeper trimmed every Tuesday. I'd always thought it was beautiful. Tonight it looked like a stage set — all clean lines and cold light, the kind of place that was designed to impress rather than to live in.

I could see them on the front steps before I even reached the gate.

Rowan stood with one hand braced against the doorframe, his jacket dry, his expression the particular brand of impatience he reserved for delayed conference calls and slow elevators. Sienna was beside him, wrapped in something cashmere and ivory, her dark hair perfectly undisturbed by the storm as though the rain itself had decided not to bother her.

And on the bottom step — scattered across the wet stone, spilling into the puddles along the garden path — were the stars.

My stars.

One thousand and one of them. I'd folded every single one by hand over the course of two winters, late nights at my desk when the office was empty and the city outside had gone quiet. Gold foil, silver foil, paper the color of midnight blue. I'd kept them in three glass jars on the shelf in the guest room — the room we'd stopped calling mine out loud but that had been mine in every way that mattered. I'd never told Rowan what they were. I'd never told anyone. Some things you keep for yourself.

They were in the mud now.

Soaked through, some of them already dissolving, the gold foil bleeding into the wet gravel like something wounded. The glass jars had been upended along the path, tossed out with the casual efficiency of someone clearing a shelf for better things.

I stopped walking.

The rain was loud in my ears. My chest did something complicated and then went very still, the way a house goes quiet after something breaks inside it.

Rowan looked up and saw me standing at the gate. His jaw tightened — not guilt, just inconvenience. The look he gave a problem that had arrived at an inopportune time.

"Ivy." His voice carried over the rain. "I said tonight. I assumed you'd use the service entrance."

I didn't answer him.

I walked through the gate and down the path, and I didn't look at the stars. I looked straight ahead. But my foot came down on one of the glass jars anyway — the largest one, the one I'd filled first — and the crunch traveled up through my heel and into my bones, a small, sickening sound that the rain almost swallowed. Almost. The shattered glass pressed into the mud, grinding the folded paper into nothing beneath my boot.

I kept walking.

Sienna watched me approach with the careful attention of someone who has already won and wants to make sure you know it. She tilted her head slightly, her expression arranging itself into something that looked like sympathy and wasn't.

"Oh," she said softly, glancing down at the scattered stars. "Were those yours? I'm sorry — I didn't realize they were sentimental. They were just taking up space."

She didn't sound sorry. She sounded like a woman who had never needed to be.

"It's fine," I said. My voice came out flat and clean. "They were just paper."

Sienna's mouth curved. She reached out and touched Rowan's arm, a small gesture, proprietary, the kind that didn't need to announce itself because it already knew the answer.

"Rowan," she said, her voice dropping into something softer, something designed to be overheard. "She's looking at me like that again. It makes me uncomfortable."

I watched Rowan's face. I'd spent three years learning to read it — the slight tension around his eyes when he was irritated, the way his mouth flattened when he was making a decision he didn't want to examine too closely. I knew his face better than I knew my own.

He didn't look at me.

He looked at Sienna, and something in his expression shifted, softened in a way I had never once seen it soften for me.

"She's leaving," he said. And then, quieter, but not quiet enough: "She's just a spoiled little rich girl playing assistant, Sienna. She means nothing to me. Never did."

The words went in clean, like a key turning in a lock.

Never did.

Not *anymore*. Not *it's complicated* or *it was a mistake*. Never. As though the last eight months had been a story he'd told himself and then decided wasn't worth keeping.

I bent down. I don't know why. My hands found one of the folded stars that had landed near the bottom step, still mostly intact, the gold foil dark with rain but holding its shape. I turned it over once between my fingers.

Then I set it back down in the mud and stood up.

"I'll be out of your way in ten minutes," I said.

I went inside. I moved through the penthouse the way you move through a place that used to mean something — quickly, without looking too long at anything. My bag was already packed, mostly. I'd been half-packed for weeks without admitting it to myself. I grabbed it from the guest room, and I didn't look at the empty shelf where the jars had been.

I was back outside in eight minutes.

The rain had gotten worse. A real storm now, the kind that turns the air white. Rowan's car was pulled around front, engine running, and he was already guiding Sienna toward it, one hand at the small of her back, his jacket held over her head like a shield.

Sienna had a small scratch on her finger. I could see the tiny bandage from where I stood at the top of the steps. She held her hand up slightly as she walked, protecting it from the rain, and Rowan ducked his head to say something close to her ear that made her laugh.

I missed the last step.

My knee hit the stone path and the pain exploded up my leg, white and immediate. I caught myself on one hand, gravel biting into my palm, and I felt the warm slide of blood beneath my torn stocking before I even had time to process what had happened.

The car door closed.

Rowan's car pulled forward — too fast, or maybe just fast enough — and the front tire hit the puddle at the edge of the drive. The wave of muddy water hit me full across the side, soaking what the rain had somehow missed.

I stayed on the ground for a moment. The taillights disappeared around the curve of the drive. The rain came straight down, indifferent and relentless.

My knee throbbed. I tried to stand and my leg buckled, and I grabbed at nothing and found nothing, and for one long, humiliating second I just knelt there in the mud with my bag on my shoulder and blood running down my shin and the ruined ghost of one thousand and one paper stars scattered around me in the dark.

Then something blocked the rain.

Not all of it. Just the part that was falling on me.

I looked up.

A black umbrella. Held steady despite the wind, which meant the hand holding it was very sure of itself.

Above the umbrella, a face I recognized — dark eyes, hard jaw, the particular stillness of a man who is never surprised by anything. The Rolls-Royce was parked at the gate behind him, engine idling, patient as a held breath.

Silas Thorne looked down at me without pity and without performance. Just looked, the way you look at something you've already decided about.

Then he crouched, and before I could find the words to object, his arms came under me — one at my back, one beneath my knees — and he lifted me from the mud like it cost him nothing at all.

"Put me down," I said.

"No," he said.

And he carried me toward the car.