Cielo stepped into the townhouse and froze. The evening lamps were dark, the rooms still, and on the table lay a small stack of opened envelopes—plain, unobtrusive, except he recognized them instantly. Ledgers. Shipping manifests. Numbers that meant nothing to most people but everything to the world he spent his nights controlling. He had arranged their delivery times meticulously. They should never have been here. Never in your hands.

His pulse hammered. The silence of the home felt like abandonment itself. A single chair was pulled back from the table, as if you had sat, read, and left. His throat tightened. If you had walked out—if you had pieced together even a fragment of the truth—

He moved before he could think, crossing the room toward the door with the single-minded urgency of a man chasing the last light of a collapsing life. His hand was on the knob when it turned from the other side.

You stepped in.

Relief punched the breath from him, sharp enough to stagger. But it lasted only a second. Your expression was unreadable—and that terrified him more. He studied you, searching for the smallest shift, the slightest tremor that might reveal what you knew.

“Darling,” he began, voice too steady for the chaos inside him, “how much… did you see?”

The question trembled at the edges—fear wrapped in velvet, bracing for an answer that could unravel everything he’d fought to hide.