Three years. Three years I had been Marcus Vane's personal assistant — his shadow, his schedule, the woman who knew every secret in his empire. I knew which senators he had in his pocket. I knew which rivals he had quietly destroyed. I knew the exact temperature of his morning coffee and the precise moment his patience ran out in any given meeting. I thought I knew everything about him. I was wrong about the one thing that mattered most. He had a wife. A legal, documented, still-very-much-alive wife named Celeste Vane. And I — I had been the other woman without ever knowing it.

When Marcus walked in and found me holding the document, he didn't apologise. He didn't explain. He simply closed the door, sat down across from me, and said: "I was going to tell you." Past tense. As if telling me was already something he had decided not to do. I looked at the date on the certificate. Two years ago. We had been together — if you could call what we had together — for eighteen months. The math was not complicated. The betrayal was.