Trapped In The Wrong Arms

The television had been on for three hours before anyone actually watched it.

That was how it usually went at the warehouse on thursday evenings, or even most evenings generally. Someone would flip it on for noise, for the weather, for the football scores that nobody really cared about, and it would sit in the corner doing its job while the real business of the evening happened around it. Drinks. Laughter. Bants, and lots of loud discussions..

Cade was at the far end of the table with a beer he hadn't touched and a report he was pretending to read. Juno sat across from him, doing something on her tablet that she would describe as winding down and he would describe as working. Two of his logistics coordinators were arguing about something near the window. Someone had ordered food. The warehouse smelled like engine oil and takeaway curry and it smelled, as it always did, exactly like what it was.

His.

He'd built it from a garage and a bad attitude and five years of channelling something he refused to name into something he could actually hold. Mercer Logistics now ran freight across twelve cities. His couriers wore his jackets. His name was on contracts he once wouldn't have been allowed to touch.

He was, by any reasonable measure, exactly where he'd wanted to be.

He picked up his beer. Put it down without drinking.

"You're doing it again," Juno said without looking up from her tablet.

"Doing what."

"The thing where you stare at the table like it owes you money."

"I'm reading."

"You haven't turned the page in forty minutes."

He turned the page. She made a sound that was not quite a laugh and returned to her screen. Five years of working alongside each other had produced a shorthand so efficient it barely needed words. Juno knew when to push and when to leave it. Tonight she was leaving it.

The television changed channels.

One of the coordinators had found the remote and was cycling through different channels. News. A cooking programme. More news. A property show. A gala; some charity event, chandeliers and champagne flutes and women in expensive dresses.....

Cade's eyes moved to the screen before he told them to.

The camera was doing what cameras at these events always did, sweeping the room in slow approval, pausing on recognisable faces, on generous cheekbones and generous donors. A man was at the podium, Silver-templed, and has a commanding aura. He was speaking, the closed captions were off but Cade could read the shape of the speech from the posture alone. Gratitude. Generosity. He looked like a man who wanted to be admired and had arranged the entire evening around making that happen.

Marcus Hale.

Cade knew the name the way you knew weather. Unavoidably. From a distance.

And then the camera found her.

She was standing slightly behind and to the right of her husband. Green dress. Dark hair swept up. Diamonds at her throat that caught the light, and shine very brightly. She was smiling at something someone near her had said, a real-looking smile, warm, reaching her eyes and the camera loved her for it, lingered on it, because that was what cameras did with faces like hers.

Selene.

The name didn't move through his head so much as land in it. Heavy. Specific. It was as if something landed on his head. His sitting posture staggered.

Nobody at the table noticed. The coordinator with the remote had settled on the channel, and appeared to be enjoying the event. The argument near the window continued. Juno's tablet made a small notification sound.

Cade watched the screen.

Selene laughed at something. Tilted her head slightly the way she'd always tilted her head when she was being polite rather than amused. He knew the difference, he'd always known the difference, that was the thing nobody in that room with their champagne and their chandeliers would ever know, they were watching a performance and calling it a woman.....

He picked up his beer. Drank. Set it down.

"Change it," he said.

The coordinator looked up. "What?"

"Change the channel."

No explanation. He didn't offer one. The remote was pointed at the screen and the gala was replaced with football and the conversation near the window continued and Juno did not look up from her tablet and everything returned to exactly what it had been thirty seconds ago.

Except Cade.

He closed the report he hadn't been reading. Pushed back from the table, said something brief to Juno, and walked through the warehouse to the far end where his office sat behind a glass partition.

He didn't turn the light on.

He sat at his desk in the dark and he thought about nothing for a very long time, which was something he had become extraordinarily good at. The discipline of not thinking about specific things. The practice of it. He had built an empire on it, arguably. You took the thing that was too heavy to carry and you put it somewhere and you walked away and you kept walking and eventually you stopped noticing the weight because the weight had become the floor.

He picked up his phone.

The screen lit his face in the dark.

He opened a browser. Typed two words.

"Selene Hale."

The results came back immediately, of course they did, she was photographed, documented, catalogued by the world she now moved through. Galas. Charity boards. The Hale Foundation's annual reports. A profile piece from eighteen months ago, some magazine, the headline something about London's most compelling philanthropic couples. There she was on the cover. Green dress, a different green from the one on the TV earlier. She had a bright smile on, and she was happy. She looked happy.

Cade looked at the photograph for a long time.

Then he put his phone face-down on the desk and sat in the dark for a while longer.

She was fine.

He'd always told himself that. And here was the evidence; photographed, documented, catalogued. She was fine. She'd made her choice and she was fine and he had made his and he was fine and that was the shape of it, had always been the shape of it, and looking at the photograph changed nothing.

He picked the phone back up.

Turned it face-up.

Looked at the photograph again.

Something about the smile.

He couldn't have said what. Only that he'd known her smile, the real one and this wasn't quite it.

He told himself he was imagining it. And frankly, he shouldn't worry about her. She made her choice, didn't care who got hurt, and he has better things to work on rather than figure out what happened to someone's smile.

He put the phone away, stood, and went back out to his team, joined in the conversation and finished his beer. By the time everyone filtered out at half eleven he was, to all visible purposes, exactly what he'd been at the start of the evening.

It was only Juno, pulling on her jacket by the door, who paused before she said goodnight and left.

Cade locked up the warehouse.

Stood in the car park for a moment in the cold night air.

She was fine.

He got in his car. Drove home. Did not think about the smile for the entire forty minutes of the journey, which was the most he'd thought about it in years.