Page 60 of His Vow

Her thumb moved across my knuckle. Back and forth.

I walked into the Vanguard at 9:00 a.m.

Declan was in the conference room. Julian was beside him. They weren't talking. The silence had the quality of a room that had been loud an hour ago and had exhausted itself. Two coffee cups sat on the table, both empty. Julian's sleeves were rolled, his hair pushed in three directions, no trace of the easy grin. Declan sat with his arms crossed, his jaw set, his blue eyes tracking me from the moment I appeared in the doorway.

They'd been calling. I hadn't answered. The gala was thirty-six hours ago, and they'd watched their partner get exposed on a stage and hadn't heard from him since.

I sat down across from them. Didn't take off my jacket. Didn't reach for the coffee.

"I have a sister," I said. "Adira. She's three years younger than me."

Julian's pen stopped. Declan's arms uncrossed slowly.

I told them everything. The sister. The Lattimores. Rhys and the pregnancy. What Hugh did — the lawyers, the eviction, the planted stories. The baby that didn't survive. The vow I made at twenty-two in a hospital room. The vendetta that predated the Vanguard. Soleil as the access point. Every secret, every layer, every lie I'd told by omission for months.

The room was very quiet when I finished.

Julian spoke first. "How long?" His voice was flat. The charm stripped clean. "How long have you been running this behind our backs?"

"Months. Since before the advisory role."

"Using our resources. Our access. Our reputation." Julian's jaw flexed. He leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling. "Jesus Christ, Nolan."

Declan didn't raise his voice. That was worse. He looked at me like a target — cold, precise assessment, deciding what I was worth.

"We built this together," he said. "The three of us. From nothing. And you treated us like tools." His eyes held mine. "The same way you treated her."

The words landed because Declan was right. The parallel. Again. Using people. Deciding unilaterally what they needed to know. Making choices for them. Hugh's playbook. My playbook. The same book.

"It's over," I said. "I'm pulling back the Lattimore pressure. All of it. The acquisitions, the regulatory plays, the foundation collapse. Done."

Julian stood. Shoved his chair back. Walked to the door without his usual wave, his usual joke, his usual parting line that made the room lighter. The door closed behind him and the absence of his warmth was its own kind of sentence.

Declan stayed. He looked at me for a long time. The office hummed around us — the same office we'd built together, the same walls, the same view of the city we'd spent years learning to reshape.

"You're going to fix this," he said. "All of it. And then we're going to talk about whether I still trust you."

He left. I sat alone in the conference room and felt the cost of every secret I'd kept settle into the chair beside me like a guest that wouldn't leave.

I gave myself one day. One day to sit in the wreckage and breathe before I started rebuilding.

I didn't go to Soleil. The pull was constant — a fist in my chest, my body wanting to be wherever she was because for months that was where the noise went quiet. But she'd asked me to stop. I stopped. That was the first honest thing I'd done for her.

My apartment held her everywhere. The rosemary plant on the windowsill, green and alive beside my thyme. Her book on the nightstand, dog-eared at a page she'd never finish here. The counter where she sat barefoot and stole off my cutting board. I moved through the rooms and every surface carried her fingerprints and the absence of her was louder than the silence had ever been before she filled it.

The sketch she drew of me sat on the coffee table. The takeout menu, the pencil lines capturing something I didn't know was visible. A sadness she could feel but couldn't source. I picked it up. The man in the drawing wasn't the weapon. He was someone Soleil saw before I knew he existed.

I set it down and left everything where she left it. Rearranging the apartment would mean accepting she wasn't coming back.

The next morning, the air on the Vanguard floor was wrong.

Julian was at his desk with a face I'd never seen — tight, focused, the sleeves rolled, three monitors running. His phone wedged between his ear and shoulder. Declan was in his office on a call, his voice low and controlled, which meant something had gone very bad.

It started with the deals. The Whitfield acquisition — clean, unrelated to Lattimore, weeks from closing. Julian called me into his office and turned his screen toward me.

"They pulled out overnight. No explanation." His pen tapped the desk. "I called. They won't take the meeting."

Declan's contact at Ridgemont Capital — a banker they'd worked with for four years — suddenly couldn't make lunch. Julian checked. He wasn't traveling. He was in his office. He was choosing not to answer.