"This is your fault, you know. Married this long and you still don't know when to hold back. The other night you were so worked up you actually hurt me. Like some nervous boy on his first time…"
My body went rigid.
My heart felt as if something very thin and very sharp had been pressed into it. A slow, spreading ache, edged with a desolation I had no word for.
Between the two of them, it really had been a first time.
I stood there, silent, hollowed out, and the memories surfaced on their own.
Five years of marriage. He had been attentive in every visible way, generous, considerate, precise. But in that kind of closeness he had always been distant. Cold. Every time felt like an obligation fulfilled, no urgency, no heat, as though he were simply checking a duty off a list.
I had told myself it was just who he was.
After all, I had never once seen him lose control of anything.
Until now. Until he became "Julian Frost."
Now I understood. When it was the person he truly loved, he lost all composure. He burned that way too.
By the time I came back to myself, the call was over and he had disappeared into the kitchen.
He waved off the compound staff and stood at the stove himself, simmering soup for Adrian Winslow with his own hands.
I watched from the doorway. A quiet, mocking breath escaped me. I pressed my thumb against the inside of my wrist, held it there for one beat, then turned and walked away.
For the next several days, I barely left my room. I was waiting for the island paperwork to clear so I could leave the Moretti compound for good.
Then Adrian Winslow was released from the Family doctor's care, and she came knocking at my door, chattering like nothing in the world had ever gone wrong.
"Sister, my husband has a race today. Come with us. I know you've been grieving since Julian passed, but locking yourself in here day after day is going to make you sick."
The two Moretti brothers had always drawn every eye in the room. Julian Frost was measured and controlled, the man groomed to run the Family's front operations. Julian Moretti, the one who wore his younger brother's name now, was the wild card, the only made son in the syndicate world who'd carved out a second life as a professional F1 driver. Opposite temperaments. Opposite trajectories.