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“I don’t know how to do this,” I say, and my voice comes out raw and scraped bare.

“Then don’t do it,” she says. “Just quit the whole thing. He doesn’t get to push you away and then force you to roll out their red carpet for them.”

“If I quit, Milo and I won’t even have a roof over our heads,” I say, clutching the napkin she shoves at me.

Five times my old salary has finally started to shrink my parents’ debt, but it’s nowhere near gone, and life with Milo has not gotten easy.

Margo freezes at that. “Then move in with me,” she says, and there is no hesitation in it at all. “My place is small, but it will fit the two of you just fine.”

I look at her. She’s barely getting by on her own, out and about hustling for extra shifts, and she doesn’t think twice before offering me everything she has. The suffocating pressure in my chest finally cracks open a little. I still have Milo. I still have Margo.

I look back down at my phone. That email is still sitting there, cold as a stone.

“Forget it,” I say, and wipe my eyes. “I will treat this like a goodbye ceremony. At least I will finish this wedding, collect my pay, and then forget him completely,” I promise her.

Margo pulls back, frowning at me. “You are sure about this?”

“I’m sure about it,” I say, pursing my lips tight. My voice is still shaking, but it comes out sounding like an actual decision.

Margo studies my face for a long moment, and then she sighs. “Fine, look at it this way,” she says. “At least you slept with the man before it all fell apart, and I bet he was worth your while, so that is not a total...”

Nausea slams up into my throat without any warning at all. I clap a hand over my mouth.

Margo stops mid-sentence.

“Sorry,” I manage, and shove my chair back from the table. “I need the restroom right now.”

I bolt out of the booth and nearly crash straight into the server bringing our food over, his tray swinging wildly back and forth. The restaurant’s thick mix of grilled meat and butter and coffee turns suffocating in my nose. My stomach twists hard, and acid surges up my throat in waves.

I push into the bathroom, double over the toilet, and dry heave into it.

It has to be the stress. That damned email, and that man, and this whole ruined week. Damn Lev for every bit of it. He has gone and made me sick.

18

LEV

I walk back onto my floor at two minutes shy of ten with Yelena at my side, and I do a double-take. Delaney’s desk is empty.

It’s not empty the way it is when she has stepped out for coffee. It is empty the way a room is empty after someone has stripped it bare, down to the last scuff on the carpet. The pens are gone from the drawer. The little stack of sticky notes that cluttered the corner is gone. Every trace of her has been cleared out, as clean as a laundering job, in the few days I was away.

“Who authorized this,” I say to the room, and my face goes flat. “Who let her leave this floor? Have you all lost your minds?”

No one answers me, the staff suddenly tense and on edge, because no one on this floor moves my people without my word.

Something locks tight across my chest. She’s done it again. She left my bed once without a sound while I lay in a post-sex haze, and now she’s left my office the same way, quietly and completely, disappearing like smoke before I could say a single thing to stop her.

Yelena loops her arm through mine. “Don’t go looking for her,” she says with thinly veiled amusement. “There’s no need for that.”

I go still, bristling. “What did you do?”

“I sent her back to Sablo House. That’s all it was.” She says it passively, as though she’s telling me the weather. “She was miserable up here and snippy with everyone. She never wanted to be your assistant in the first place. I did the girl a kindness.”

Her light tone scrapes down my spine, and I grit my teeth. Every personnel decision in this building, down to the brigade leaders on the docks, passes through me before it happens. Yelena has been in my life long enough to know that. She knows I don’t lose control of my own floor, and she did it anyway, shamelessly.

“You reassigned my assistant,” I say. “Without ever asking me.”

“She is not yours, Lev.” There’s a small, lethal edge under the sweetness now. “She told me herself how hard you drive her, how heartless you can be. The late nights. The impossible reports. I simply let a tired employee go back to the job she actually likes.”