said.

“I was meeting someone from the Attorney General’s office.

They asked me questions about the Castellan account.

About Pier 6.

About something called the night ledger.”

For the first time since she had known him, Dominic’s expression shifted with visible force.

It lasted half a second.

Mara saw it anyway.

He knew about the ledger.

Her stomach tightened.

“They think I have access,” she continued.

“They think I can help them build a case.

And yesterday, someone left this under my apartment door.”

Dominic did not move toward her.

“Open it.”

“I already did.”

“Then show me.”

Mara slid out the photograph.

It was grainy, taken from across the street at night.

Mara stepping into Dominic’s town car after the Pier 6 security breach two weeks earlier.

Dominic holding the door open.

His hand hovering near the small of her back, not quite touching her.

On the back, in thick black marker, someone had written one line.

Choose carefully, sweetheart.

Dominic stared at the photograph.

The air changed.

It was not anger exactly.

It was colder than anger, more focused.

A blade finding its angle.

“Who gave you this?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Who else has seen it?”

“No one.”

“Lila?”

“She only knows I was leaving.”

His jaw tightened.

“You should have come to me.”

Mara laughed once.

It sounded wrong in the beautiful room.

“With what? The fact that the government thinks I’m useful, someone thinks I’m leverage, and I was stupid enough to fall in love with the one man both sides are circling?”

His face tightened at the last words.

She turned away before she could see more.

“I don’t expect you to answer,” she said.

“I don’t expect anything.

I wrote my resignation because staying here puts both of us in danger.”

Dominic came around the desk.

Mara stepped back.

He stopped immediately.

That restraint broke something in her more than force would have.

A cruel man would have advanced.

A careless man would have used her confession.

Dominic only stood there, hands open at his sides, as if the space between them belonged entirely to her.

“I heard you in the elevator,” he said.

“I know.”

“I heard all of it.”

Her cheeks burned.

“Then be kind enough to forget it.”

“I have spent three years trying to forget what I feel when you walk into a room.”

Mara’s breath caught.

Dominic’s voice remained low, but the control in it had begun to crack at the edges.

“I kept distance because my world punishes anyone close to me.

I kept you behind titles and meetings because your name was the one clean thing in this building.”

She stared at him.

For a moment, the photograph, the resignation, the federal office, all of it slipped behind the shock of those words.

“You should not have heard that,” she whispered.

“No,” Dominic said.

“But I did.”

His phone vibrated on the desk.

Neither of them moved.

Then it vibrated again.

Dominic glanced at the screen, and the color left his face so subtly that anyone else might have missed it.

Mara did not.

“What is it?” she asked.

He turned the phone face down.

“Nothing.”

A lie.

She had watched Dominic negotiate with union heads, senators, bankers, and men who wore guns beneath expensive