She Kissed a Stranger to Escape Her Stalker—Then Discovered the Entire City Feared the Man She Had Just Chosen to Hide Behind.

PART 4

Two nights later, Nadia appeared in the kitchen carrying her gray stuffed elephant. “Peanut is hurt.”

Silas set aside his coffee. The elephant’s cloth ear had torn open. White stuffing protruded from the seam. “Can you fix him?”

“I can try.”

Silas found a sewing kit and spent forty minutes repairing the ear. His stitches were uneven. The man who could coordinate a dozen companies and memorize an enemy’s financial history could not sew a straight line.

Nadia examined the result. Silas waited tensely.

“It’s prettier,” she announced. “Now Peanut has a special ear.”

Silas looked at the crooked stitches. Priya stood unseen in the doorway. She knew how much he hated imperfections. She had first found him straightening a painting while armed men waited in the shadows. Yet he did not remove the crooked stitches. He let them remain because Nadia loved them.

That was the moment Priya understood she was falling in love with him.

Then she noticed the open laptop on the kitchen table. Audio-editing software filled the screen. A recording had been paused halfway through. She put on the headphones and pressed the space bar.

Marcus’s voice entered her ear. Tired. Terrified. Alive. He was telling someone that he had copies of the board meetings. He begged them to leave Priya and Nadia alone.

Priya’s knees weakened. Marcus had not abandoned her to a criminal debt. He had tried to expose a fraud scheme and hidden the evidence around her neck because he believed no one would search something so cheap.

Then she heard Warren Holcombe. The man who had hired her. The man who had denied her childhood surgery. The man whose hospital had allowed Silas’s mother to die.

Silas stood in the kitchen doorway. “You knew,” Priya said.

He did not lie. “For three days.”

“When were you going to tell me?”

“After Holcombe could no longer hurt you.”

“After he was dead?”

Silence answered her. Priya removed the headphones. “Do you remember taking the necklace while I was treating Emmett?”

“Yes.”

“I told myself it was urgent. I made an excuse for you because I wanted to believe you were different.”

“I was protecting you.”

“No. You were deciding for me.”

“He killed your husband.”

“And I deserved to know that.”

“He would have used the truth to draw you out.”

“You used ignorance to keep me inside.” Priya’s voice broke, but she did not lower it. “Marcus loved me and still decided I could not handle the truth. Curtis frightened me because another man ordered him to. The foster system moved me through homes without asking what I wanted. Now you are doing the same thing, Silas.”

“I am not them.”

“You simply make control look more beautiful.”

She went upstairs, woke Nadia, and left the mansion.

Silas did not stop her. For the first time in his adult life, the Architect had no plan.

Priya returned to her apartment and reported for her hospital shift the following evening. At eleven o’clock, she walked out through the employee entrance.

She never reached the parking lot.