The morning air had ambition. It tasted like citrus and cold water, the sort of air that made you believe the universe had finally filed its paperwork. Adrian stood in it like a man who wasn't absolutely winging his entire life, dressed in a body-suiting office ensemble.
He filled his lungs. Held it. Exhaled.
Kefas was in police custody. The city's business ratings were due out today. And Star was keeping the baby.
Adrian didn't have certainty—he operated the way a man jumps from one rooftop to the next: moving on instinct, hoping the gap isn't wider than his courage. Something about the life quietly knitting itself together inside Star felt... precious. Gem-like. Oddly familiar in a way that bypassed logic and drove straight into his gut. So he'd told her to stop telling people she was raped. Instead, say the baby was his.
Star did not care for the way Adrian was moving, all slow-blinking certainty and strange umbilical attachment to a child that wasn't technically his. And she certainly wasn't running around town claiming maternity-by-Adrian. But, as she'd discovered, standing at a cocktail party explaining you were raped was not exactly good for the appetizer circulation. So she'd agreed. Reluctantly. The way a cat agrees to a bath.
"Where are you going?" Star asked the second he emerged, fully dressed, while she was still marinating in his oversized clothes. Her own outfit was off being chemically interrogated by a dry-cleaning maid—the smell of the hooligans she'd killed to save Adrian still clinging to the fabric like a bad memory with commitment issues.
"To work," Adrian replied.
Simple. Infuriating. And criminally hot in that suit. Star had to physically sigh the inappropriate thoughts back into their cage before they escaped and did things her reputation couldn't afford. She rolled onto the bed and stared at the ceiling, which was a safer view than Adrian's silhouette.
"You'll be fine," he said, misting himself with cologne. The scent drifted across the room and punched her right in the resolve.
She flipped back over. "Do you have a girlfriend there?"
"You're my girlfriend."
"No, I'm not!" The frown she produced was practically a sculpture.
Adrian paused, the cologne bottle hovering mid-air. He set it down with the care of someone trying not to spook a horse. Then he strode to the bed, leaned over her, and let the silence do half the work.
"What did you mean?" he asked.
Before she could answer, he kept going. "You kissed me. We sleep in the same bed. You eat my cravings." A beat. "You're attracted to me. In fact, right now, I'd bet my tailor you're thinking of ways to rip off this suit and—kiss me again. Not to mention..." He let the pause stretch like expensive elastic. "...you're carrying my baby."
Poker face. Immaculate.
Star just lay there, musing at him. Even through the emotional brickwork he was laying, she could see the tiny cracks where her words had landed. But he was correct about one thing: she did want to rip off that suit. She wanted to kiss him until he forgot his own name and had to borrow someone else's. Ever since they'd started making out, Adrian's lips had become the warm, impossible comfort she hadn't known was missing—like candy that refused to give you diabetes, or the perfect chicken thigh, hot and glistening. Just like right now.
Adrian saw that glassy, fantasy-logged look in her eyes and decided to be helpful. He kissed her.
To Star, this was less a kiss and more the collapse of a dam. Recently, kissing Adrian turned her on so fast it was almost embarrassing, which was especially inconvenient given her sexual experience consisted of one traumatic non-consensual event and zero voluntary data points. She didn't know the mechanics of passion in practice. Right now, her body was sprinting ahead of her brain and ignoring all traffic signals. She ripped herself away and bolted for the bathroom. The shower came on with a vengeful hiss, water cascading over her—clothes and all—like a moral intervention.
"Is everything okay?" Adrian's voice came through the door, but the smirk was practically audible.
"Yeah... I'm fine," she managed, while her body conducted an internal coup.
Adrian let the smirk have its moment. Oh, she reciprocates alright.
A phone rang in the bedroom. Not his. Not Star's. He followed the sound to the nightstand: a silver iPhone 17 shivering with a call. Star had mentioned she had Lucian's phone—the one he'd used to track her to B1 Highway.
Adrian's brow folded into deep, sudden confusion. The caller ID read: MD, Throne Enterprise.
"Why is the MD of Throne Enterprise calling Lucian?" he murmured, just as his own phone erupted.
"Boss, you need to come to the office ASAP." Lazarus's voice was haste distilled, strained through trouble. Then the line went dead.
Adrian glanced toward the bathroom, where Star was currently rinsing off a hormonal rebellion. He grabbed his work backpack, his phone, and selected a car key from the drawer of many—a decadent, jangling buffet of vehicular possibilities.
"Star, I'm leaving!" he called.
"Okay! I'll be—"
"No." He cut her off gently but firmly. "I should find you here. I won't take long. I promise."
Star agreed, and he was out the door.
***
A while later, boredom or curiosity—hard to tell the difference with Star—sent her hunting for the maid. The one with her clothes.
"Still working on them, miss," the maid said, not even looking up.
Star accepted this with the grace of someone who'd been wearing her sort-of-boyfriend's clothes for so long they were starting to feel like a personality trait. She headed back toward Adrian's floor, riding the elevator with no expectations and, as it turned out, no luck.
The elevator stopped at Floor 6. The doors parted. And there stood Tiffany.
Her lips didn't just purse; they practically folded into a punitive little origami. Her mood curdled on the spot.
Star, who hadn't planned her next facial expression, discovered a mischievous smile already waiting on her lips like it had been expecting this moment all day. She stepped out, making sure to brush past Tiffany with just enough contact to say, Yes, these are his clothes. Yes, I slept in them. No, I will not be elaborating.
Tiffany, predictably, elaborated instead.
"You think Adrian wants you?" Her voice had that brittle, trying-to-sound-bored quality that meant she was actively dying inside. "You think this is a relationship? He's using you to get back at me. Give it five minutes and he'll be back home."
Star trailed off into a theatrical "Hmm," as if consulting a deep memory bank. "That's funny. That's not what he was saying when he was inside me last night." She let her voice drip with sweet, venomous nostalgia. "I mean, he said a lot of things, but I honestly can't remember—" a pause, a blink, a grin "—because he was showering me with so many kisses and so much love I choked."
Tiffany's face went through a series of emotions that Star would have needed a thesaurus to catalog. Star was fairly certain that if she'd licked Tiffany's cheek right then, it would've tasted like pure sodium and regret.
The real dagger? Tiffany and Adrian had never been intimate. Not once. And now here was Star, the poor sweets-girl from campus, wearing his clothes and coughing on his affection.
"But I'm sure you're right," Star added with a sigh. "He'll be back home."
Tiffany stabbed the elevator button like it owed her money. The doors opened. Maria stepped out, arms full of shopping bags, her smile arriving before her eye contact—which is to say, the smile never really landed.
"Girls..." Maria said, her voice the verbal equivalent of a decorative pillow. "Please don't tell me Adrian is your hot topic."
"No, ma'am." Star matched her energy, and then some. "Tiffany was just showing me around the house. She's family, too."
Maria's smile tightened the way a politician's does when you ask the wrong question. She excused herself politely and hurried off toward her room, bags rattling with the sound of things that probably weren't evidence but felt like they should be.
Tiffany, not done, fired her parting shot. "You're a rebound. A distraction. Adrian loves me more than he's ever loved you. So I don't care if you've been intimate." She stepped backward into the elevator, still talking. "He knows where home is."
The doors closed. Star didn't answer. She just stood there, and what rose up in her wasn't anger—it was sadness, with a side of pity. Tiffany might actually love Adrian. And now she was delusional enough to think love was a boomerang.
"Love make people pathetic" she hummed.
Star wandered Floor 6, eyes roaming. Her gaze caught on Maria's door. The woman had been floating around her own house for days, looking at Star like she was a temporary rug, and she had no idea Star knew her deepest, most rotting secrets.
Star hated people like Maria. Betrayers. Manipulators. Architects of other people's ruin. Maybe right now she was in that room, plotting something fresh and horrible for Adrian. Star knew she was a nobody in this house—no title, no last name, no leverage. But lately, looking at Adrian, watching him fall so openly and carelessly in love with her... it was like watching her own heart walk around outside her body. And Maria wasn't his mother. He didn't even know it. Which meant Star had to protect her heart. By any means.
She knocked. Once.
The door drifted open on its own, a slow, squeaking invitation. Star frowned. The room looked empty, but she'd seen Maria walk in seconds ago. There was no other way out of that hallway. She'd been standing right here.
"Mrs. Stark?" Star called, peeking in.
The room was enormous, expensively appointed. Maria had taste; Star would give her that. Branded everything, meticulously arranged. But no Maria. Not by the bed, not in the sitting area, not—obviously—in the shower. No sign of a human being at all.
"Mrs. Stark?" Star called again, now fully inside.
Nothing.
She turned to leave. That's when it happened.
A soft beep. A section of the wall—wallpaper-flawless a second ago—shifted. A device emerged, sleek and seamless, and trained its light directly on Star's face. Right in the eyes.
Beep.
A thin mechanical voice, barely above a whisper:
"ACCESS DENIED."
Star stared. The words blinked at her, red and final.
"WTF?" she burst out, and her feet decided before her brain did. She bolted. Out the room, down the hall, up the stairs, straight to Adrian's room, where the air was still cologne-soaked and safe-ish and she could pretend her hands weren't shaking.
***
Stark Architect stood as it always did—gleaming, arrogant, a monument to Adrian's eight-year reign. But the moment Adrian stepped through the lobby, the air was wrong. Not the temperature. The vibe. Employees looked at him the way villagers look at a volcano: respect, terror, and the urgent desire to be somewhere else.
Not one of them volunteered what had happened. They just radiated bad news like body heat.
Adrian took his private elevator. By the time the doors opened on the top floor, his frown had packed a suitcase and settled in for the long haul. Lazarus was already there, hovering in the doorway of the CEO office like a man delivering a eulogy.
"Boss, I refreshed. Many times. Believe me." Lazarus's voice was nearly apologetic. The word nearly doing a lot of heavy lifting.
He handed Adrian the iPad.
Adrian looked down. The frown upgraded itself. What had been confusion now clocked in as shock, with disbelief riding shotgun.
Stark Architect—still number one. Still on top in stocks. But down. Ten percent down.
That had never happened. Not once. Not in eight years.
Adrian refreshed. Then again. Then a third time, because maybe the numbers would magically reconsider their life choices. They didn't.
He'd made sure the Bonita incident—the coronation catastrophe—never breathed on social media. His IT team had worked through the night, scrubbing, burying, burning every trace. He'd taken extra precautions. Paranoia-level precautions. And still. The worst had found a crack, wriggled through, and now his company was hemorrhaging nearly fifty billion dollars. A paper cut doesn't describe it. This was a paper amputation.
"Kefas must be laughing right now," Adrian said, settling into his chair with the weight of a man who'd just watched gravity win.
At the CPD station, Kefas was, in fact, laughing his lungs out. Handcuffs jangled with every wheeze. The ratings glowed on Bonita's iPad, and Kefas looked at them the way a gourmand looks at a roasting spit.
"Now," Bonita said, snatching the iPad back, "it's your turn to meet the end of your bargain."
Kefas's grin only widened. He was still handcuffed, still in his suit, still waiting for his lawyers with the insouciance of a man who treated incarceration like a mild scheduling conflict.
"Did you kill my dad?" Bonita asked. Flat. Direct. Second time she'd asked. Possibly the last.
"Mmm." Kefas mused, regarding Bonita as though she were a mildly interesting insect. "How do I know you don't have a recorder in there? Recording me?"
"You want to know what I have?" Bonita swiped her iPad and turned the screen toward him.
The grin didn't just vanish—it evacuated. Kefas's face underwent a full architectural collapse.
"What is this?"
"That," Bonita said, "is my puzzle board. Solving my dad's disappearance. And you're my main suspect."
She didn't have a recorder. She had something better. Obsession. Eight years of it, pinned and stringed and cross-referenced.
"I know my mom stole my brother's renderings for you. All five projects you've completed in the last few years? My brother's work. My mother's sticky fingers." Bonita leaned in and dropped her voice to a whisper. "And if you look in the corner of that board... she's a suspect too. So tell me, Kefas." She didn't blink. "Did you and my mom kill my dad?"
Kefas slid the iPad back across the table. His expression had morphed into something stranger: rage, yes, but also sadness. The sadness didn't belong. It didn't fit the scene, and Bonita couldn't decode why it was there.
"Do you even know your own identity?" Kefas asked. Poker face back, but cracked at the edges.
Bonita frowned. Out of pocket.
"You're running around looking for someone who doesn't even want you." Kefas tilted his head. "Do you know what Maria and David were fighting about when he disappeared?"
"I don't care." Bonita's teeth were clenched hard enough to crack a molar. "I want my dad. And I know my identity. I have a millennium mantle to prove it."
Kefas looked at her for a long moment. "Women," he said, as though the word itself exhausted him. "You all amaze me. And you disappoint me." A beat. "Tell Maria she disappointed me."
Bonita stood. She could feel the slap coiled in her arm, begging to be thrown, but assaulting a man old enough to be her father—in a police station, no less—was not on today's vision board.
"You can have the best lawyers in Crestfall," she said, gathering her iPad and her fury. "But my brother has money."
She left.
And just after Bonita swept out, the detective arrived at Kefas's cell with the energy of someone delivering a pizza he didn't cook.
"No one's responding, Mr. Sterling. You'll have to represent yourself. Trial's scheduled next Monday."
Kefas blinked. "You mean I'll be in here over the weekend? I have a company to run!"
His voice scaled up into a full-throated roar. "This is all Adrian Stark! He's framing me!"
The detective walked away, message delivered, eardrums retreating to safety. He didn't get paid enough to absorb the tantrums of rich brats, and Kefas—handcuffed, lawyerless, and suddenly very loud—was giving a masterclass.