Every year since Dominic Sloane had taken me into his world, I'd baked his birthday cake by hand. Seven years of flour-dusted countertops and buttercream under my nails, seven years of fondant smoothed with fingers that knew his preferences better than he did.
When I glanced at the screen of his phone, I knew right then who it was for again.
That little cartoon avatar. Penelope Vitale's profile picture, bright and girlish against the cold glass of a phone that rarely lit up for me.
I didn't say a thing, and the silence that settled over the living room was the kind that precedes a verdict. The kind of quiet that fills a room when someone has already made their decision but hasn't announced it yet.
But Dominic was completely unaware of how unreasonable his request had been. He looked at me, waiting for a yes. The Don of the Sloane family, a man whose word rearranged lives, standing in his own kitchen asking the woman he'd neglected for seven years to bake a cake for the girl he couldn't stop protecting.
Eventually, I just nodded, keeping my expression neutral. "Send me the picture," I said, standing up. "I'll head out now to buy the ingredients."
I thought back to that dinner seven years ago. The one where a client with wandering hands and too much grappa had cornered me during my first week handling accounts for a family-adjacent operation. If Dominic hadn't been there, if he hadn't materialized at my side with that cold authority that made grown men excuse themselves to the restroom, I wouldn't have made it out of my first job unscathed.
I glanced at him one last time, thinking, Once I finish this cake, I'll finally be done with him.
I headed for the door, feeling the heaviness in my steps. The marble floors of the penthouse stretched out before me like a sentence I'd been serving.
Before I could reach the doorway, Dominic's voice, surprised, cut through the silence behind me.
"Olivia…" he started, his voice unsure.
I didn't bother turning around. "Anything else?" I asked, my tone flat.
There was a pause. The kind of pause that in any other household might mean nothing. In the home of a Don, a pause was a calculation. I could almost hear the gears turning, the brief war between the man who never explained himself and whatever unnamed thing had flickered across his face.
"...I'll send you money for the ingredients."
I continued on my tracks without a word.
When I stepped into the elevator, the doors closing me into that polished steel box, I pulled out my phone. Opening up our chat history, I stared at the numbers.
5,363. That's how many messages I'd sent him.
He'd replied to only 25.
It was draining to care, so I could only smirk. The expression felt foreign on my face, like wearing someone else's coat. Five thousand messages into the void. Five thousand small surrenders disguised as persistence. I'd been the most loyal woman in the Sloane household, and I had the receipts to prove that loyalty had been a monologue.
Upstairs, in the living room, Dominic's phone would buzz with the notification of the transfer being rejected. I could imagine his hand clenched around the phone as he read the alert. The silver lighter would be in his other hand, rolling between thumb and forefinger, and for once I hoped the rolling stopped. I hoped the stillness hit him. I hoped he felt even a fraction of the nothing I'd been swallowing for years.
Later that night, around eight, my phone rang. Dominic's name flashed on the screen.
I was sitting in a booth at a diner near my place, a quiet establishment on the border of neutral territory where nobody knew my face or cared whose woman I was. I picked at my food, moving a piece of grilled chicken from one side of the plate to the other.
