Rhett's Pov
Five a.m. The weight room. The air is cold and still, the kind of silence that presses against your skin. I move through the sets like a machine, controlled, merciless, but today my mind keeps slipping. Each rep is supposed to be about dominance over myself, about proving that no feeling, no distraction, can dictate what my body does. I've done this since I was seventeen, back when control was the only thing I could trust. But this morning, my grip on the bar feels tighter than necessary, my jaw clenched harder. Something is gnawing at the edges of my discipline, something I refuse to name.
By six I'm at my desk, the city still dark beyond the windows. By seven the first calls have come and gone, voices sharp with urgency I cut through like wire. By noon I've closed a position three people swore was impossible before quarter's end. The satisfaction should feel sharper, cleaner, instead it lands dully, like applause in an empty room. By three I'm in the logistics acquisition meeting, dismantling objections in forty minutes instead of two hours because I came prepared and they didn't. Fifteen hours, clean, efficient. Every outcome inside the margin I set.
This is what a good day looks like for me. I know most people wouldn't call it that, they'd call it lonely, they'd call it hollow. Sometimes, in the quiet spaces between victories, I almost agree with them.
>>>
Declan arrives at eight with a bottle of whiskey he chose precisely because he knows I hate it. It's his small, familiar rebellion, a way to poke at the armor and see if anything flinches. I pour two glasses of the one I keep for him instead, he smirks like he's won something. I let him. Some nights it's easier to give him the illusion of power than to fight over nothing.
We sit at the kitchen table the way we have every Thursday for six years, no restaurants, no takeout. Just two men who've seen too much of each other's ugly sides pretending, for one meal, that we're capable of ordinary. He talks about Dublin, about the board member who's becoming a liability. I listen, offering the occasional question that sharpens his thinking. This is why I keep him, he sees angles I sometimes miss, angles born from a recklessness I've long since disciplined out of myself.
Then, between the second and third glass, he says it casually, too casually, "I ran into someone yesterday, woman from your circle. One of the foundation events, I think." He swirls the amber liquid. "She asked how things were going with the Adley situation."
The words land like a stone in still water. I feel the ripple move through my chest before my face betrays anything.
"The Adley situation," I repeat slowly.
"Her words." Declan's eyes flick to mine, then away. There's something careful in his tone now, like he's testing ice. "Struck me as odd. The way she said it."
It is odd. Caden is my oldest friend. His sister, Wren, is... a favor I agreed to. A responsibility. That's all it's supposed to be. But the word 'situation' implies something managed, something ongoing and contained. It implies I have a role that goes beyond quiet oversight. And no one outside my tightest circle should know enough to phrase it that way.
I file the unease away, but it doesn't settle cleanly. It sticks somewhere near my ribs, warm and restless. I don't ask Declan who the woman was, he would've told me if he could.
The rest of dinner feels heavier. I laugh at the right moments, but my mind keeps circling back to Wren's face in that gallery, the way her camera seemed like armor and confession at once. Declan watches me a little too closely when my phone vibrates later. He's always watching lately.
>>>
At half past nine my phone hums against my thigh. Estate security, perimeter anomaly, east side. Motion sensor. Probably deer or wind. No visual confirmation needed.
I pull up the secondary feed anyway. My thumb hovers, nothing moves. Just shadows and leaves. I should feel relief. Instead, a low current of tension runs under my skin, the kind that never quite leaves anymore. I put the phone down. Declan keeps talking about Dublin without missing a beat, but I catch the brief pause in his rhythm, the way he notes my movements like a man cataloging changes in the weather.
He leaves at ten-thirty. I walk him to the door, lock it behind him, and stand in the hallway for a long moment. The house feels suddenly vast and echoing, stripped of the only voice that ever fills it. The silence isn't peaceful. It's accusing. It asks questions I spend my waking hours outrunning, 'Is this enough? Is this all there is?'
>>>
In my office, I pull up the gallery footage. I tell myself it's protocol, standard monitoring because of Caden's sister, because of Joel Pryce, because I don't leave variables unchecked. But twenty minutes later I'm still watching, and the excuses have grown thin.
The woman Declan mentioned moves through the crowd with practiced ease. She belongs everywhere, which usually means she's spent years learning how not to. I watch her talk, watch the calculated tilt of her head. Then the camera finds Wren.
Wren doesn't know she's being observed. She's in that space behind her lens where the world narrows to light and truth and she forgets to guard her expression. There's something raw in the way she lifts the camera toward the woman, instinct, not decision. And in the frames where Wren's face is visible, unguarded... God. The slight furrow of concentration, the way her lips part just barely when she sees something that moves her. A quiet hunger for beauty, for honesty, in a world that offers so little of either.
I feel it low in my stomach, a pull I have no right to. Protectiveness, yes. I was asked to watch over her, but this is something else now, something sharper, warmer, more dangerous. I've caught myself thinking about her at odd hours. The way she challenged me, the way she saw through the polished surface I show the world. It unsettles me how much I want to know what she sees when she looks at me.
I slam the laptop shut.
The silence rushes back in, louder than before. I sit there, heart beating harder than it should after a day this controlled, and I realize I can't fully account for what I was searching for in that footage. I'm not going to examine it. I'm going to stand up, go to bed, and wake up tomorrow ready to run the same flawless machine.
My secure server pings.
I open it with a slowness I don't usually allow myself.
One message, triple-routed, sender masked, no subject.
Four words.
'You have the wrong man.'
The air leaves the room. My pulse kicks up, a sudden, traitorous spike, wrong man. The words echo against every wall I've built. Caden. Wren. The favor that stopped feeling like a favor weeks ago. The quiet, gnawing sense that something larger is moving beneath the surface of my careful life.
I stare at the screen until the letters blur. For the first time in years, the discipline cracks, just a hairline fracture, but enough to let in the cold. Who is this message from? What do they know? And why does the thought of something touching Wren's world make my hands tighten into fists?
I close the laptop again, but the words stay with me as I head upstairs. The house is too quiet. My body is tired, but my mind won't stop turning. Somewhere in the dark, the weight of everything I control, and everything I suddenly fear I don't, presses down harder than any barbell ever could.