Lorenzo’s POV
“Nine a.m.
Courthouse.
Don’t be late.”
I looked at the words sitting there on my screen and felt something cold and unsatisfied twist in my gut.
Divorce.
That was mercy too, wasn’t it.
A clean signature, a stamp, and she walks off scot-free after making a public fool of the man whose ring she’d worn for exactly one day.
She played me.
In my world, people who played me didn’t stroll away smiling.
My thumb moved before I’d finished the thought.
“Unsend.”
The message vanished.
No.
She didn’t get to skip out that easy.
I lifted the phone and dialed Leo instead.
“Boss.”
“Send two of ours to Rosewood.
Quietly.” My voice was low, even, the way it always was when I’ve decided how something’s going to go.
“There’s a woman leaving the building.
I want her rattled.
Not touched.
Just—reminded whose name she’s carrying.”
“On it.”
I hung up and stepped out from under the awning, into the dark at the edge of the parking court, telling myself I only wanted to watch it happen.
That was a lie, and I knew it.
My feet had made that decision somewhere before my head signed off on it.
And there she was, ten yards ahead, phone in hand, and the cheating little climber, Marco, storming up behind her, grabbing her wrist.
I went still.
Then I watched her tear his hand off her, one finger at a time, cold as a razor.
Watched her scrub her palm clean like his touch was filth.
Watched her look him dead in the eye and gut him with a few flat sentences before she walked away and left him standing there shaking with his fists balled up.
“You wouldn’t let me touch you…
satisfy me and I’ll cut Isabella off.”
I’d heard all of it.
Every word carried clean across the quiet court.
She hadn’t been curling into that man tonight.
She’d been running a con on him, on all of them, working the room to twist a knife into her sister.
The baby, the sweet voice, the head on his shoulder.
A performance.
And she’d walked out the other side of it not with a lover, but with a man left choking on his own ego.
Something in my chest eased half an inch, and right behind it came a low, unwelcome pull.
Guilt.
I’d read her wrong.
She hadn’t forgiven a damn thing.
I’d sent two of my men to frighten a woman who’d done nothing but outmaneuver a room full of people who deserved it.
I reached for my phone to call Leo off.
Then, at the edge of my vision, I caught them.
My two men, peeling off the far wall, moving toward her through the dark with that unhurried, purposeful walk I’d trained into them myself.
Too late to make a call.
Too far to shout.
I moved.
I crossed the distance in three strides, wrapped a hand across her mouth before she could make a sound, and hauled her sideways into the mouth of the alley, into the black, out of the line of their approach.
She went rigid against me, heart slamming, and I pressed us both flat into the shadow of the brick as my men passed the alley mouth and kept walking, scanning the empty court for a target that was no longer there.
And I stood there in the dark with her spine against my chest and her breath fast under my palm, and I couldn’t for the life of me explain the thing happening in my own body.
She’d lied to me.
That was all.
A wife I’d married on paper, a woman who was supposed to be a line item in a contract, had lied to me and I’d lost my grip over it.
Called men.
Followed her into a parking lot like some jealous fool.
A contract wife wasn’t supposed to move me at all.
So why the hell was my pulse the loud one now?