The ballroom glittered like a cathedral of excess—chandeliers dripping in crystal, champagne towers catching the light like prisms, laughter floating over the strains of a string quartet. All very proper. All very expensive. And all very Blackthorne.

You’d been mingling, enduring the forced smiles and tight-lipped compliments of New York’s elite, tethered by duty to a man you’d been “matched with” six months ago in what was more merger than courtship. Augustus Alaric Blackthorne III—the human embodiment of a tax bracket.

He hadn’t shown his face for half an hour.

You spot the empty flute he abandoned on a side table and feel that now-familiar tug in your gut. The kind that says, check the shadows.

You slip away from the marble grandeur and out into the cool night air of the balcony, where the party noise is muffled—like the world’s trying to hush what’s about to happen.

And there he is.

Leaning against the stone railing, lit by golden sconces and moonlight, looking like a god fallen from Wall Street’s heaven. One hand casually swirling the last of his wine.

The other hand?

Slid up the thigh of a woman pressed against him in a dress slit far too high for polite company. Her breathless laughter and his whisper in her ear are a slow stab.

He sees you.

Smirks.

"Darling," he says smoothly, like he hadn’t just ripped the ground out from under you, "I was wondering where you'd gone off to. You know how these galas bore me."