Nadia's POV
-
I give myself exactly one day.
That's what I decided after I closed the door on Marcus yesterday. One day to sit with my grandfather's letter, with everything Marcus told me in that hallway, with the full enormous weight of what I've walked into. One day to feel it. One day to be the woman who just found out the name she's carrying is stitched to the people who took from her family.
Then I fold it up. I put it in the locked room in my chest. And I get to work.
Because here is what I know about falling apart: it is a luxury. And right now I cannot afford luxuries. I can afford strategy. I can afford precision. I can afford to become exactly the kind of woman that makes people like Ethan's family very, very uncomfortable.
So that's what I'm doing.
I've been in Steele Tower for six days. In six days I have learned more about Marcus Steele than most people learn in six years, because I study the way other people breathe — constantly, without thinking about it, because stopping would be dangerous.
Here is what I know so far.
He wakes up at five. Not because an alarm makes him — I've checked, there's no alarm — but because his body decided long ago that sleeping past five is time he could be using. He's at his desk by five-fifteen. I know this because the light under his study door is visible from the kitchen, and I've been getting up early too because this apartment doesn't feel like somewhere you sleep deeply yet.
He drinks his coffee black. No exceptions, no variations. The coffee is always the same brand, always the same strength. I noticed Rosa measures it the same way every single morning and I noticed Marcus never comments on it, which means it's always exactly right.
He doesn't eat breakfast. He doesn't seem to notice that he doesn't eat breakfast. By eleven he's had four cups of coffee and nothing else and there's a particular tension that sits in his jaw by mid-morning that I think even he doesn't realize is hunger.
He comes home late. Not because he loses track of time — Marcus Steele does not lose track of time — but because leaving earlier would mean admitting the workday has an end. He leaves when the work is done. The work is apparently never done.
We've eaten dinner together twice. Both times: quiet, efficient, the conversation limited to logistics. The gala Friday. The account he set up in my name — operational expense, he said, and I accepted it that way, no thank you, no resistance, because I understand the language of transactions now. He tells me what I need for the role. I receive it. We proceed.
He is the most controlled person I have ever been in a room with. And I was married to a man who controlled everything so precisely that I didn't notice the walls going up until I was already inside them.
But Marcus isn't like that. The control isn't about me. It isn't pointed outward at all. It's entirely internal — like a man who learned very young that the only safe thing to manage is himself, and has been doing it so long he doesn't know another way.
I'm looking for the through-line. The thing underneath all the precision that explains why a man this controlled makes a choice like this one.
I haven't found it yet.
-
On day six, Patricia calls.
"The legal filing is ready," she says. "We can move on the heirship claim as early as next week. But Nadia — I need to warn you. When this goes public, it will be loud. Ethan's family will fight it. There will be press."
"I know," I say.
"You'll need to be positioned as credible. Stable. Not a woman in crisis."
"I'm not a woman in crisis," I say.
"I know that," she says. "Make sure everyone else does too."
I hang up and sit with that for a minute.
Then I call Dom.
She answers on the first ring, which she always does for me, and her first words are: "I have been waiting six days for this call and I have so much to say so please do not interrupt me."
I don't interrupt her.
She talks for four minutes straight. About the social landscape. About the gala Friday. About three events in the next two weeks where my presence as Marcus Steele's wife will register in specific rooms with specific people. She uses words like positioning and narrative and reclamation and by the end of it I feel something I haven't felt since I walked into this tower.
Ready.
"Dom," I say when she finally pauses. "I need you to make sure that when people see me Friday, they see someone who chose this. Not someone who was rescued."
A beat.
"Baby," she says warmly. "That's exactly what I've been planning."
-
Friday arrives.
I'm dressed and ready eight minutes before Marcus appears. I did that deliberately — I will not be the person who makes us late, I will not give him any operational reason to find me lacking.
He comes down the hallway in a dark suit and stops when he sees me.
He looks at me for exactly three seconds. I count.
"Ready?" he says.
"Yes," I say.
The car ride is quiet, same as always. But something is slightly different tonight. He looks out his window and I look out mine and the silence has a different texture — less like two strangers tolerating proximity and more like two people thinking about the same thing from opposite directions.
The gala is loud and bright and full of the kind of people who smile with their mouths and calculate with their eyes. Marcus moves through it like water around stone — smooth, inevitable, leaving no unnecessary ripples.
I stay close but not attached. I work the room the way Patricia told me to — visible, calm, confident. I talk to three board members' wives who are very clearly assessing me. I pass. I can always tell when I pass.
At hour four Marcus appears beside me with a glass of water.
"You haven't eaten," he says. Low. Just to me.
I look at him. "I was about to."
He nods once and moves away.
It's nothing. It's a practical observation. I file it next to everything else.
But on the car ride home, I open my phone and find a message from Dom sent thirty minutes ago.
A screenshot. From a gossip account with two hundred thousand followers.
A photo of Marcus, taken tonight from across the room, looking in my direction.
Dom's message beneath it: Girl. That man is not looking at you like a business arrangement. That man is looking at you like a problem he can't solve and it's ruining his whole evening. I need you to see this.
I look at the photo.
I look at his face in it.
And the through-line I've been searching for all week clicks into place so suddenly it takes my breath away.
He's been watching me the same way I've been watching him.