Chapter3
Chloe's POV
The city moved past me in streaks of neon and headlight.
I pulled over somewhere unfamiliar and started walking — aimlessly, desperately — in search of a bar. Any bar. My feet throbbed in my heels, but I kept going until I found one.
Then I looked up. The Full Moon Club.
Selena had mentioned this place once. Best neutral ground in the city, she'd said. Nobody cares what class you are.
Good. I walked in.
I slid onto a stool at the far end of the bar. "Double vodka tonic," I said.
One drink. Two.
The alcohol spread warm through my chest, and the memories came uninvited. Three years ago, Arthur showing up at my apartment past midnight with cold medicine because I'd mentioned in passing that I wasn't feeling well. His hand cool against my forehead.
This is what it feels like to be chosen, I'd thought, and I had believed it so completely that it had never once occurred to me to question it.
My mother, when my father was still alive. The way she'd fussed over small things — whether my coat was warm enough, whether I'd slept enough hours. Sweetheart, she'd called me, like it was something that wouldn't run out.
It ran out.
I took another drink, and the bitter arithmetic of it settled in my stomach like lead. No lover. No family. The people who had loved me were either dead or gone.
"I'm such an idiot," I said, to nobody.
The bartender refilled without being asked. I decided he was the best person I'd met all day. I held up four fingers and drank half the new glass in one go. No studio rent paid past next month. No plan that hadn't just collapsed underneath me. I should remember exactly how this felt.
It was well past midnight, and the bar was still alive with heat and noise — bodies pressed close, music thrumming low through the floorboards, the air thick with alcohol and perfume.
Then, without warning, the room went quiet.
The conversations dropped and the crowd shifted. A tall figure crossed toward the VIP section with the kind of unhurried certainty that didn't need to announce itself, and the bartender already had a glass waiting before the man had settled into his seat.
I couldn't help but look.
High cheekbones, a jaw that could have been carved from something harder than bone, his hair falling loose at the temples. When he turned his head and I caught his eyes — gray-blue, the color of deep water before a storm, holding light without giving it back — I forgot, for exactly one second, what I had been thinking about.
There was an overpowering aura about him. Everyone in the bar regarded him with profound deference the moment they set eyes on him.
Then his scent reached me.
Cedar, clean and sharp, threading through the bar's haze of alcohol and perfume. That smells really good, something in me noted, involuntary and startled.
My heart kicked up without permission. I told myself it was the alcohol. But something beneath my hearts was whispering closer, go closer in a voice and my skin had gone warm in a way that had nothing to do with the bar's heat, and I couldn't look away.
Suddenly, someone lurched into me from behind, and I felt myself pitching forward before I could stop it.
His hands caught me — one at my elbow, one at my waist — and the contact landed like a current, immediate and warm and far too present for a stranger's touch. I looked up.
Up close, those eyes were more attractive. The blue had depth I hadn't been able to see from across the room, gold threading the very edges. His nostrils flared, barely perceptible — and then something strange happened. The tension in his jaw eased by a fraction, his shoulders dropped almost imperceptibly, and his eyes went slightly unfocused, like a man who had braced for something and found the opposite. Like something in him had gone quiet without his permission.
He blinked. The sharpness came back, harder than before.
"What are you using." Not a question. His voice was low, controlled in a way that suggested something underneath it wasn't.
"What?"
"Perfume. What did you put on." His fingers spread slightly at my waist, like he was trying to anchor himself against something.
"I'm not wearing anything."
"You're lying." But he didn't sound certain — he sounded off-balance, which didn't fit at all with the presence that had parted the crowd for him. "What are you doing here."
"Having a drink. Same as everyone else."
"No." Flat. Definite. "You walked into me on purpose. You saw me come in. You waited."
"Someone pushed me—"
"No one pushed you." His hand tightened fractionally at my waist. "Explain why you smell like—" He stopped. His jaw worked. "It's not possible. Who sent you here."
"No one sent me."
"I don't believe you."
"I don't care." The words came out sharper than I'd intended, three drinks and an entire collapsed evening catching up with me at once. "I came here to get drunk and forget about a very bad night. That's all this is."
He looked at me for a long moment. Something moved through his expression — suspicion shifting, recalibrating. His thumb pressed slowly at my waist, a single deliberate movement, and I was fairly certain he didn't know he'd done it.
I was tired. That was the truest thing I could say about myself right now — tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour. Three years of being careful. Three years of making myself small enough to fit into the space Arthur had decided I deserved, of being kept hidden like something he was ashamed of, of being grateful for it. Three years, and tonight he'd been in my father's house with Mia, and he hadn't even sounded guilty.
And now I was standing here with his hand at my waist, and the cedar scent of him had wrapped around me, and I thought about how Arthur had warned me — specifically, carefully, more than once. Stay away from Victor Sterling. He'd never told me why. He'd just needed me to stay invisible, same as always.
Why does he get to be the only one who stops being careful.
The thought arrived without guilt. Just sat there, clean and quiet, in the wreckage of the evening.
I reached up slowly, curved my hand against the side of his jaw, and kissed him.
He went absolutely still.
When I pulled back just enough to look at him, those gray-blue eyes had gone dark, the gold threading through them burning brighter, something in their depths that was completely, deliberately certain.
"You sure about this." Low. Quiet. A line being drawn in the air between us.
"Yes," I said.
He looked at me one moment longer — reading me, finding whatever he was looking for — and something settled in his expression like a door closing.
"Then don't regret it," he said. "Your choice."
He picked me up in one clean motion. I grabbed his lapel on instinct. Around us the bar had gone quiet in that particular way again, people stepping back, eyes dropping, nobody meeting his gaze as he moved toward the exit with the same unhurried certainty he'd walked in with.
The night air hit my face when the door opened — cool and sharp, cutting through the alcohol haze — and the cedar scent of him wrapped around me, steady and warm and closer now than it had been all night.
