Rain crawled under Elara's collar and pooled in her shoes with each shift of weight. The hallway light bounced off the marble and stabbed her eyes. She squinted. Wet ropes of hair stuck to her cheeks. When she tried to peel them away, her fingers came back numb. The wool of her coat sagged, waterlogged, pulling at her shoulders. Somewhere deep in the building, machinery hummed. The vibration traveled up through her feet, into her knees. She lifted her hand toward the brushed steel buzzer. It shook. Her fingers looked pale, pruned, the nails gone violet at the edges.
Julian Sterling's door. The monster's brother lived at the top of the city. Liam used to say it like a joke, lazy and amused, fingers curled around her throat just tight enough to sting.
The door itself looked indifferent, a perfect slab of dark wood wrapped in clean chrome. No peephole, no welcome mat, just a discreet number and the sleek pad beside it. Her breath steamed faintly in the overcooled air, tasting of coffee gone sour hours ago. A drop slid off the end of her nose, splashed on the black stone, and shattered into points. She checked the phone screen ghosting in her other hand. Late enough that normal people slept. Liam would notice an empty side of the bed.
Liam's voice threaded through the quiet, easy and poisoned. Julian is worse than me, El. Even monsters fear him. Before, that had always sounded like bragging. Now it felt like warning, replaying in her skull in perfect detail, the way his mouth had quirked as if he found himself charming. Her fingers remembered the way he had pressed them to the faint swell of her belly, softer than the rest of him. Eight weeks, he had said, satisfied. Eight weeks and you are mine. The elevator ride up had made her nauseous: not from the motion but from the fact that she had chosen this, this door, this name.
Leaving had been a decision and not a decision, a snap inside her that had come when she saw her own terror reflected in a bathroom mirror. Now her body refused to finish what her mind had started. Her fingertip hovered a breath from the buzzer, numb from cold and from pressing too hard into the strap of her bag all the way here. If Liam had tracked her phone, if he had checked the security feeds at the garage, he would know she had left the building. Her throat tightened until swallowing felt like dragging glass.
She stabbed the button.
The sound that answered was a clean, discreet chime behind the wood, nothing like the harsh buzz she expected. It died almost at once, leaving only the thin hiss of the building's ventilation. Elara pressed her palm against her chest. Her heart banged against her ribs in a too-fast rhythm. She imagined Liam rolling over in their bed, touching cool sheets, his hand spreading on empty space. Her skin prickled as if he had already found her, as if he stood at her back, breath warm and familiar at her ear.
Nothing moved on the other side of the door. No muffled footsteps, no chain sliding free. The silence thickened, padded, the way it had in the Sterling townhouse at midnight dinners, when Liam's father had measured her with those cold eyes. The hallway smelled faintly of lemon cleaner and her own soaked wool, sharp and animal. Her phone felt greasy in her hand. No missed calls. No messages. That quiet hurt almost more than his temper would have. No news meant she was ahead of him. The city was big enough to swallow one woman whole. The lie sat heavy on her tongue.
From far below, an elevator dinged, the chime small and echoing up the spine of the building. Her body went rigid. She turned, listening, every muscle tight, expecting voices, the bark of her name. Only the polite slide of doors closing floated up, then the soft mechanical sigh of ascent. Not this floor. Not yet. The number on Julian's door blurred. She could still leave. She could take the stairs down and keep moving until her legs quit and the baby absorbing her panic. Her stomach rolled. The idea of stepping back into that open, watched city tightened something feral in her chest. Here, at least, there was one door between her and Liam.
The latch clicked. It was a small sound, almost dainty, but it cracked through her thoughts. The handle turned, slow and certain, and the door opened a handspan, then wider. Warm light washed over the threshold, soft and golden, smelling faintly of paper and something smoky, like expensive tea or the last of a candle. He filled the doorway. Taller than in the photographs on Liam's phone, where he always stood a little back from the family cluster, shoulders half-turned as if already leaving. In person, Julian Sterling seemed to darken the light behind him. The same Sterling grey eyes met hers, but on him the color looked colder: like iron.
His gaze ran over her in one unbroken sweep. Water dropped from the hem of her coat and pooled on his pale floor. Her jeans clung to her legs, the denim rough where it chafed at the backs of her knees. Her fingers had gathered at her lower stomach without her permission, gripping the damp wool as if she could shield what lay beneath. He noticed. She felt it in the infinitesimal pause of his inspection, in the way his gaze sharpened there before returning to her face. Up close she could see the differences from Liam: the cleaner line of Julian's jaw, the almost imperceptible scar that tugged one eyebrow. Not handsome in the way magazines liked. Sharper. Colder.
Her throat worked, dry. The words she had rehearsed in the cab dissolved. No polite greeting, no explanation seemed safe. If she spoke Liam's name, it would conjure him, drag him into this hallway. The chill from her clothes had sunk into her bones, made her jaw tremble. When she finally heard her own voice, it came out as a ragged whisper, raw as if scraped from her lungs. "Don't send me back."
The plea hung between them, fragile and obscene, stripping them both of any chance at pretending this was an ordinary intrusion.
For a second nothing moved. Then Julian's jaw tightened, a small clench that made the muscles there jump. Something passed through his eyes, quick and unreadable, as if the words had slotted into a space in his head he had already prepared. He did not look surprised to see her. He did not ask who she was. Of course he knew. Her picture had been on Liam's phone too, on his arm, in rooms like this one filled with things that were not hers. But then his gaze flicked past her shoulder to the empty hallway, just for a beat. Checking, calculating. When his attention returned to her face, whatever he'd been weighing was decided.
The hum of the climate control grew louder. Elara's lungs burned as she held herself very still, braced for a door closing, for a hand reaching for a phone, for the clean betrayal of his mouth shaping his brother's name.
He did none of that. Julian stepped closer instead, the movement unhurried and controlled, and reached past her shoulder. His scent brushed over her, clean cotton and the faint bitter edge of old coffee. The air stirred as he leaned, his sleeve whispering against the rough wool of her coat without quite touching her skin. His fingers extended along the line of the door, palm open to the hallway. He looked up and down the corridor, the same quick, precise cataloguing he had used on her now applied to the velvet silence. No guards. No staff. No cameras she could see. Only polished stone, expensive stillness, and that low mechanical hum.
Standing there with his body a barrier between her and the open hall, she felt exposed and hidden at once. Liam's brand of danger had always been loud, a rush of temper, the crash of a glass against a wall. Julian's felt quieter, like deep water. His presence pressed on her skin without contact, a gravity field she had stepped into by coming here. Her fingers dug into the wool over her abdomen until they ached. The baby was too small to feel, but she sensed it anyway: weightless promise and threat. There was nowhere else to run. No friend he had not already isolated her from, no hotel he could not buy. This threshold was the only border left between past and whatever waited on the other side.
Julian straightened, his attention returning to her face, and something settled there, a decision locking into place. Without speaking, he moved his hand to hover just beside her shoulder. Close enough that she felt the heat of his skin through the soaked fabric. His other hand caught the edge of the door and pulled. The motion drew her with it, the world narrowing to the warm spill of light and the quiet closing of the gap behind her as he drew her inside.