Chapter 2 2

Alena's coffee cup tilted, the liquid arching through the air in slow motion, and she watched it happen like she was standing outside her own body. The heat registered two seconds later, a sharp sting across her knuckles that she didn't bother to acknowledge. Her eyes were fixed on the tablet screen, on the image that Gary and Brenda were leaning over with the casual hunger of people consuming someone else's life.

"Can you believe this?" Brenda's voice came from far away, underwater. "They look obsessed with each other."

The cover of Vanity Fair filled the screen in high resolution. Kane Moody in midnight blue Tom Ford, his hand cupping the face of a woman Alena recognized from billboards and award shows and the kind of Instagram posts that got a million likes in an hour. Izabella Weaver. Emerald eyes, cheekbones like architecture, a mouth that looked like it had never said anything desperate.

They were kissing. Not a staged press kiss, not a red carpet peck. His thumb on her jaw, her fingers in his hair, the angle of his body leaning into hers like gravity had shifted just for them.

The headline burned into Alena's retinas: Hollywood's Golden Bachelor Finds His Match: Inside Kane and Izabella's Love Story.

"Sources close to the couple say it's serious," Gary read aloud, his voice carrying that particular excitement people got when disaster happened to someone famous enough to make it entertainment. "Moody told our reporter this is the first time he's ever wanted to build something real."

First time.

Alena's stomach convulsed. She turned, her shoulder catching the doorframe, and stumbled toward the restroom. Behind her, Brenda called her name, something about the client presentation, but the words dissolved into static.

She made it to the last stall before her legs gave out. The lock clicked, metal on metal, and she slid down the painted steel door until she was sitting on the cold tile, her knees drawn up, her forehead pressed against her forearms. Her phone buzzed in her pocket, a continuous vibration that felt like an electric shock against her hip.

She didn't look. She knew what the messages would say. The handful of people on the periphery of her life who knew, who had seen her disappear for weekends and return with expensive bags and hollow eyes. Are you okay? Is it true? Did you know?

Her thumb moved without her permission, unlocking the screen, opening Safari. The Vanity Fair article loaded in seconds, the website optimized for the traffic surge of celebrity gossip. She scrolled past the cover image, past the introduction, to the section marked "The Courtship."

Lake Como, the text read. Three weeks in a private villa. The same three weeks Kane had texted her goodnight from "London" with photos of gray skies and filming schedules that didn't exist.

Alena's breath came in shallow gasps, her ribs too tight, her lungs forgetting how to expand. She remembered those weeks. The way she'd waited by her phone each night, telling herself that no news was good news, that his silence meant he was tired, not that he was gone. The way she'd bought the light chestnut hair dye because she was bored, because she wanted to surprise him, because she was desperate for any reaction that would prove she still existed in his field of vision.

Her phone buzzed again. Not a text this time. A notification from an app she hadn't opened in months, the one with the skull icon that Kane had installed himself, whispering about security and privacy and trust.

Her heart stopped. Literally stopped, one missed beat, two, before slamming back to life with a force that made her dizzy.

She opened the app with a thumb that didn't feel like her own. The interface was stark, black and white, no encryption keys visible to the user. Just a message thread with a single contact. KM.

The message was timestamped four minutes ago. While she was sitting on this bathroom floor, while her coworkers were gossiping about his new love, while the world was rearranging itself around her without warning.

The text read: The TMZ leak about my location. Was it you?

Alena stared at the screen. Her eyes moved over the words, individual letters, black pixels on white background, and her brain refused to assemble them into meaning. She read it again. And again.

Her thumbs moved, autocorrect fighting her, her nails clicking against the glass.

You announce your new relationship on the cover of Vanity Fair and you're asking ME about a leak?

The typing indicator appeared. Three dots. Disappeared. Appeared again.

Finally: Only you knew that flight number. Keep your mouth shut or you'll regret it.

Alena's laugh came out wrong, a broken sound that echoed off the bathroom tiles. She pressed call before she could think, her thumb hammering the icon, but the phone rang once and went to voicemail. His voice, smooth and professional, thanking her for her call and promising to get back to her soon.

Soon. Five years reduced to a voicemail prompt.

She typed furiously, the words blurring: I'm going to the police. I'll prove I didn't leak anything. We're done.

She hit send. The message status changed to delivered. Changed to read.

The screen flickered.

Alena watched, frozen, as the entire message thread began to erase itself from the bottom up, each bubble disappearing in rapid succession, her words and his vanishing like they'd never existed. The app interface went gray, then black. She tried to tap the icon again from her home screen. A small pop-up appeared: "Service Disabled." She tapped it again, and the icon simply dissolved, leaving a blank space in the grid of her apps.

In the silence of the bathroom stall, with the smell of industrial cleaner and her own sweat, Alena Gordon understood that she had never known Kane Moody at all. And that he had always known exactly how to hurt her.