Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 46223 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 231(@200wpm)___ 185(@250wpm)___ 154(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 46223 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 231(@200wpm)___ 185(@250wpm)___ 154(@300wpm)
Riggs’s gaze cuts to me. Private is not a word he likes. “No,” he says, before I can answer. “She doesn’t go anywhere alone.”
Brice pastes on a sympathetic smile. “Of course not alone. With me. This is from the client. They want to capture her reaction without a wall of people. It’s literally two minutes.” He offers his palms like peace offerings. “We need spontaneity. We need magic.”
Riggs doesn’t blink. “Magic can wait for security.”
Lina, trying to be helpful, chirps, “I’ll hover just outside the curtain—”
“Fine.” Brice’s tone tightens. He leans in, voice dropping. “Vanessa, this is the designer’s request. If we don’t get it, we lose the hero post.”
I glance from Brice to Riggs. Brice looks harried in the way he always looks right before we hit something big and shiny. Riggs looks like a wall. His eyes track the corridor to the back rooms, the manager folding tissue at the counter, the stack of shipping boxes by a swinging door. Something in my belly pinches.
“Two minutes,” I say to Riggs, trying to make it sound like no big deal. “Curtain open. Lina outside.”
He doesn’t like it. I can see it in the tick of his jaw. He angles to go with me anyway.
Brice steps to intercept, palms up, laugh fake. “Boys aren’t allowed in the sanctum,” he says, hamming the word. “Designer’s rule. Mystic feminine energy and all that. Don’t worry—we’ll be in the first stall.” He touches his headset. “Lina, grab your mic. We’ll keep comms open.”
Riggs weighs—two minutes, my insistence, the client. He shifts an inch, then nods once to me, not to Brice. “Curtain stays open. Lina stays at the doorway. Two minutes means one. I’m ten feet away.”
“Copy,” I say softly.
Brice shepherds me toward the back. The fitting rooms are a little maze of velvet curtains instead of doors, mirrors everywhere. The air’s warmer from too many bodies and a steamer sighing somewhere. The corridor is empty. The security cam in the corner wears a Band-Aid of opaque tape. I stop.
“Why is that covered?” I ask.
Brice doesn’t miss a step. “Oh, it’s angled wrong. It always catches customers changing. The manager covers it when the rooms are in use. Privacy thing.”
It’s plausible. It still feels wrong. I make myself breathe. Four in. Hold. Four out. Hold.
Brice opens a curtain with a flourish. “Look three reveal,” he says brightly. “Give me wonder. Give me—”
Something slides behind the next curtain. Not a person. A shadow unhooks itself and steps through the fabric like it owns the air.
“Kellan,” Brice says, that pleasant voice he uses with clients, only now it has something ugly coiled under it. “You have ninety seconds.”
My body fails to process the name. Then it doesn’t. My heart trips, skids, slams. Kellan steps fully into the small fitting alcove like we’re meeting for coffee. Cap. Messenger bag. A smile that never reached his eyes even when I liked it.
“Hi, V,” he says, soft, like this is a reunion and not a nightmare. “You look beautiful.”
I step back. The mirror catches my movement and multiplies it. The corridor is a thin slice of light beyond Kellan’s shoulder, and Lina’s voice floats from the front in a haze of laughter. Brice stays between me and the opening, blocking the spill of light with his shoulders.
“What are you doing,” I manage. My voice sounds wrong in the velvet-damp lay of the fitting room. “You can’t be here.”
Kellan’s gaze flicks to Brice, then back. “I can be wherever I want,” he says. “Anywhere with you.”
“Stop with all the dialogue,” Brice says, too dry. He taps his watch. “Hurry. He said two minutes.”
“Brice,” I whisper. The truth clicks together in my head, awful and neat. “You.”
He’s careful not to look sorry. He’s careful to look world-weary. “Nobody’s hurting you,” he says, and I realize with dead clarity that people only say that when that exact thing is on the table. “This is a nudge. A beat. The arc needed stakes. You’ll survive it and your numbers will—”
“Shut up,” Kellan snaps without looking at him. The messenger bag slides off his shoulder and lands on the bench. He steps closer. “I missed you,” he says. “You went and got yourself a prop with a beard.”
Heat floods my face. Rage drowns fear for a beat and I cling to it like a lifeline. “He’s not a prop,” I say. I keep my voice low because Riggs is ten feet away, because the curtain is a membrane, because I have to survive the next sixty seconds. “He’s the man who will end you if you touch me.”
Kellan’s smile widens like I told him a joke. “Jealous is a good color on him,” he muses. “It’ll photograph well.”
My throat is raw. “You sent me notes.”
“It was romantic,” he says, and the word hits me like ice water. “We’re meant to be a we again. You forgot I write the moments. You perform them.”