Ember Vane POV
The rain in New York doesn't wash you clean.
If anything, it just pushes the grime deeper into your pores.
I walked until my shoes were soaked through, the expensive leather ruined, my toes numb and useless.
My lungs burned with every breath, a fire that had nothing to do with the scars on my back and everything to do with the fever spiking in my blood.
I collapsed on a street corner in Hell's Kitchen.
I didn't feel the pavement hit my knees.
I just felt the sudden, merciful cessation of movement as the world tilted sideways and went black.
When I woke up, the air smelled of bleach and stale coffee.
It wasn't the private suite at Mount Sinai with the Egyptian cotton sheets Julian usually paid for to keep up appearances.
It was a public ward.
A thin curtain separated me from a man coughing up his lungs on the left.
A nurse with tired eyes was checking my IV bag.
"You're awake," she said, not looking up from her clipboard. "Pneumonia. You're lucky a cab driver saw you go down."
"How long?" I croaked. My throat felt like it was lined with broken glass.
"Two days."
Two days.
I looked at the scratched plastic nightstand.
My phone was there, the battery indicator blinking red.
There were no missed calls from Julian.
Not one.
There were, however, fifteen messages from a number I didn't save but knew by heart.
Estelle.
I opened them, my thumb hovering over the cracked screen, trembling slightly.
They were photos.
The first was a close-up of a necklace.
A heavy, antique emerald choker set in gold.
Julian said this brings out my eyes. It was his grandmother's. Didn't you say you wanted to wear this for the wedding? Oops.
The second was a video.
I shouldn't have played it.
It was shaky footage, taken from a distance, maybe by a bodyguard who knew better than to intervene.
Julian and Estelle were standing on a cliffside overlooking the Palisades.
The wind was whipping Estelle's hair, and Julian was brushing it away from her face with a gentleness I had never known.
"I promise," Julian's voice carried over the wind, tinny but unmistakable. "You are the only thing in this world I care about losing."
He kissed her forehead.
It was a tender, reverent kiss.
The kind of kiss you give a holy relic you are terrified to break.
I turned off the phone.
The tears didn't come.
My tear ducts felt like dried riverbeds, scorched by the fever.
I discharged myself against medical advice four hours later.
I sat on the curb outside the hospital, shivering in my damp, wrinkled clothes, and called Julian.
He answered on the first ring.
"Where the hell are you?" he barked. "The dress fitting is in an hour."
"I was in the hospital," I said, my voice flat.
"Again? You're becoming a liability, Ember. I don't have time to play nursemaid."
"Come pick me up," I said.
He arrived twenty minutes later in a black SUV.
He didn't get out to open the door.
I climbed in, the heat blasting against my feverish skin, making me nauseous.
"You look like a corpse," he said, glancing at me in the rearview mirror with cold detachment.
"I feel like one," I said.
He merged into traffic, heading north, away from the city.
"We aren't going to the penthouse," he said.
"I know."
"My father wants us at the Estate until the wedding. He thinks it's better for security. And it keeps you away from... distractions."
He meant it kept me away from the press.
He meant it kept me in a cage where I couldn't embarrass him.
We drove through the iron gates of the Moretti Estate in silence.
It was a fortress of stone and ivy, beautiful and suffocating.
Julian parked the car near the main entrance.
"Go inside," he said, not killing the engine. "Get cleaned up. You look pathetic."
I opened the door, the cold air biting at my skin.
"Julian," I said.
He looked at me, his hand already on his phone, likely texting her.
"What?"
"Do you love me?"
He didn't look up.
"I'm marrying you, aren't I? Stop asking stupid questions."
He rolled up the window.
I stood on the gravel driveway, watching him drive toward the guest house where I knew she would be waiting.
He didn't answer the question.
But that was an answer in itself.
