You Broke Me, He Bought Me

The call connected on the second ring.

I wasn't expecting her voice.

I wasn't expecting anyone's voice except his.

"Find Rowan?" A lazy, almost amused lilt. The kind of voice that belonged to someone freshly awake, tangled in expensive sheets. "He's in the shower."

The world didn't stop. That was the strange part. The city kept humming outside my window, taxis honking six floors below, someone's coffee maker gurgling in the break room down the hall. Everything kept moving while something inside my chest simply... cracked.

My nail broke the skin of my palm before I even realized I'd made a fist. A single bead of blood welled up, bright and small. I stared at it. Swallowed the sourness climbing my throat.

"I see," I said. My own voice surprised me — steady, almost polite. "I'll call back."

I hung up before she could say anything else.

Sienna Voss. I didn't need an introduction. The whole city knew her name. Model, socialite, the kind of woman who existed in glossy magazine spreads and Rowan Blackwell's orbit for years before I ever stumbled into it. I'd told myself she was history. I'd believed it, or tried to, the way you try to believe a scar has fully healed until you press it and feel the ache underneath.

He was in the shower.

In our penthouse.

I set my phone face-down on my desk and pressed both palms flat against the cool surface, breathing through my nose the way my therapist once taught me. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. It didn't work. It never actually worked. It just gave my hands something to do while my mind ran the numbers — three years, two months, seventeen days of being Rowan Blackwell's personal assistant, and the last eight months of being something he'd never once put a name to.

My phone lit up. His name on the screen.

I let it ring twice before I answered.

"Ivy." No preamble. That was Rowan — he treated words like currency, spent them only when necessary. "I need you to come by the penthouse tonight. Pack your things from the guest room."

The guest room. That was what we were calling it now.

"Pack them where?" I asked.

"Wherever you keep your things. A storage unit. Your sister's place." A pause, and in that pause I heard something that might have been discomfort, or might have been nothing at all. With Rowan, it was impossible to tell. "Sienna doesn't like the smell of cheap perfume in the penthouse."

The words landed like a slap, flat and precise.

*Cheap perfume.*

I'd bought that bottle at a department store counter three Christmases ago, because Rowan had once, exactly once, leaned close to my neck in an elevator and said *that's nice* in a voice so low I'd almost convinced myself I'd imagined it. I'd worn it every day since.

Cheap.

"Don't worry, Rowan." My voice came out quieter than I intended, but cleaner. Sharper. Like a blade that had been waiting to be used. "I'll make sure there's not a single trace of me left to ruin her perfect illusion."

Silence stretched between us, thin and taut.

"Tonight," he said, and ended the call.

I sat with the dead phone in my hand for a long moment. Outside, the afternoon light had gone gray, clouds rolling in fast from the west, the kind that promised a real storm, not just drizzle. The fluorescent lights in the office felt suddenly too bright, too clinical, like the lighting in a hospital room where someone was telling you news you already knew but hadn't been ready to hear.

I opened my desk drawer. Beneath a spare phone charger and a box of paper clips, the resignation letter had been sitting for six weeks. I'd drafted it twice, deleted it twice, printed it on the third attempt and then buried it here because I was a coward, or because I was hopeful, which in the end amounts to the same thing.

I smoothed it flat on the desk. Read it once. My eyes blurred on the second line and I stopped reading, uncapped a pen, and signed my name at the bottom.

Ivy Callahan. Two neat syllables. Easy to forget.

I slid the letter into an envelope, wrote his name on the front — *Rowan Blackwell, CEO* — and left it on his assistant's desk on the way out. His *other* assistant. The one who hadn't made the mistake of thinking proximity was the same as belonging.

The elevator took forever. I stared at my reflection in the mirrored doors — mascara still intact, somehow, blazer still straight, the small crescent of dried blood on my palm the only evidence that anything had happened at all. I looked like a woman who had everything under control.

I almost laughed.

The lobby doors opened and the rain hit me immediately, cold and aggressive, soaking through my blazer in seconds. I hadn't brought an umbrella. I never brought an umbrella because Rowan's driver always had one, and I'd grown careless about the small things you need to survive on your own.

I walked anyway. One foot, then the other, down the wide front steps of the Blackwell Group tower, into the downpour, chin up because there was no one left to perform dignity for and yet I couldn't seem to stop.

I nearly walked straight into the car.

It was parked at the curb — a black Rolls-Royce Phantom, engine idling, sleek and enormous and somehow silent despite the rain hammering its roof. I stumbled back a step, my heel catching on the wet pavement, one hand shooting out to catch myself.

The window descended.

Not quickly. Slowly, deliberately, the way expensive things always move — like time itself adjusts to accommodate them.

The man inside was watching me. Dark eyes, almost black, set beneath a hard brow. The kind of face that made you feel seen in a way that wasn't entirely comfortable. He looked like trouble that had learned to dress well.

His voice came low and even through the rain, cutting through the noise of the storm like it wasn't even there.

"Get in."