Page 37 of Suite 7

“Vera.” He says my name like he’s still deciding what to do with it. “What are you⁠—”

“I’ve been reading Dominic’s materials,” I say, before he can finish the question. “The ones he sent when he took me as a client. The ones I read enough of to feel prepared for Saturday and apparently not enough of to understand what I was actually agreeing to.”

He goes still.

“Can I come in?”

He steps back without a word and opens the door wider, and I walk past him into the clean lines and expensive quiet of his office. Floor-to-ceiling windows showing the city going dark, blueprints spread across the drafting table in his precise handwriting, not a single thing out of place. The door closes behind me with a soft click.

We stand three feet apart and I don’t wait for him to arrange the conversation the way he likes it.

“The section on post-scene protocol,” I say, watching his face. “The Dom creating distance as a form of aftercare. Stepping back so the submissive has space to process without the pressure of their presence. That’s what you were doing this morning.”

He holds my gaze. “Yes.”

One word. Calm. Factual.

“You could have told me that.”

“Vera —”

“Instead of standing at a door and delivering responsibility like you were filing a report.” My voice comes out sharper than I intend, and good, because it deserves to.

“I spent this entire morning thinking you were treating me like I was just another scene you’d handled and moved on from. You built this whole careful architecture of distance and I had no context for it, no framework, no way to understand what I was looking at, and it felt —“ I stop, because I don’t want to say how it felt, which is its own kind of information I’m not ready to hand over.

“You had three sentences. This is protocol. This is why. This is what I’m doing. That was all it would have taken.”

I’m pacing. I notice this and make myself stop.

Kane watches me without defending, without explaining, without reaching for the professional distance he was wearing this morning. No, he’s listening. Which, infuriatingly, makes me more furious than if he’d argued back.

“Your closed-off behavior this morning made me feel like last night was nothing,” I say. “Like I was nothing. Like you’d processed a scene and moved on, and I was still standing there trying to read you and getting nothing back.” I press my lips together. “You should have told me. That’s not a small thing to leave out.”

The silence that follows is different from his usual considered pauses. Heavier. Something working behind it.

Then: “You’re right.”

I blink at him.

“I defaulted to protocol without explaining it,” he says. “I made a choice about how to handle the aftermath without considering how it would land for you specifically. Without thinking about the difference between following procedure and actually communicating with you.” A pause. “I’m sorry.”

I stare at him.

Kane Sinclair just apologized. Directly, without qualification, without deflecting it back into a lesson about something I’d done wrong, without any of the careful architecture he usually builds around an admission of any kind. He just acknowledged the thing and owned it and said the words, and I had genuinely not prepared for that.

“Oh,” I say, which is not my most articulate moment.

The corner of his mouth moves, almost imperceptibly. “Is there more?”

I look at him: the weight of the question, the stillness of his posture, the way he makes himself available without pressing forward. He’s holding the door open and waiting to see if I’ll walk through it, and it annoys me in a way that has nothing to do with the apology. Even now, standing in his own office in shirtsleeves with blueprints dust on his hands, he’s reading me.

“I can’t stop thinking about last night,” I hear myself say.

He doesn’t move. Doesn’t react. Stays exactly where he is.

“I’ve been trying all day and I can’t —“ The sentence doesn’t finish. I try a different way in.

“I know what happened. I understand what you were doing and I know why, but I keep —” I stop again, and I’m aware of how absurd this is, that I can manage a brand crisis in seven minutes on a Sunday sidewalk and I cannot finish a sentence in this man’s office.