Page 2 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
I'm already walking.
The east wing is used for private events. Off the main hall, it's quieter. The kind of place a venue puts engaged couples for intimate dinners or corporate clients who need discretion. One long corridor with heavy oak doors, most of them standing open.
One isn't.
I don't have a premonition, exactly. I'm not a dramatic person—I've always been practical to a fault, which is probably why I organized charitable galas for a living and never once questioned the life I was assembling piece by piece in my perfectly reasonable way. But something about the closed doorsits wrong in my chest, and I push it open before I can think better of it.
I should have thought better of it.
Dawson has his hand cupped around a woman's face, the way he used to touch mine—deliberate and proprietary—kissing her. She's in a deep green dress I vaguely recognize from the guest list. One of his colleagues. His head snaps up the second the door moves.
The sound I make isn't a scream. It's quieter than that, and somehow worse.
"Harper." Dawson steps back instantly, both hands raising like I'm something to be managed. "This is not okay. I need you to listen to me."
I don't say anything. The woman in the green dress has gone chalky white. She slips past me and out the door without a word, and I watch her go because it's easier than looking at Dawson.
"It was a mistake," he says. "It was nothing. I've been under so much pressure with the development deal and everything with the wedding, and I made a terrible?—"
"Stop." My voice comes out steady. I'm almost impressed by it. "Don't do the speech."
"Harper—"
"Dawson." I finally look at him. He's perfectly groomed, as always. Slick dark hair, icy blue eyes, and a tailored suit. He looks like a man who has never been inconvenienced a day in his life, and he looks annoyed, which is somehow the worst part. Underneath the apology, he is annoyed. "Give me your phone."
"What?"
"Give me your phone."
It's there and gone—the microsecond calculation, the rapid reassessment of his position, there in his face before the control locks back down. He knows how to read a room. It's his greatestprofessional skill. He's deciding right now whether to give me the phone or try something else.
He hands me the phone.
I don't even have to scroll far.
The messages are from the same contact—first name only. The timestamp on the most recent one is forty minutes ago.Can't wait to see you today.
The message before that is from three weeks prior. The one before that, six weeks. I keep scrolling, and the thread keeps going and going and going, and I become aware of a low, steady roaring in my ears, entirely unrelated to the string quartet downstairs, which is still playing.
"How long?" I send myself email screenshots of the proof in front of my eyes.
"Harper—"
"How long?" I find the next thread from another woman. And then another. I take multiple screenshots and immediately email them to myself so they don't live in my photo album, saving them to fully rehash on another day. I do all of this on autopilot, the practical part of me running on a separate track from everything else—hands moving, phone working, the rest of me somewhere behind my own eyes watching it happen from a distance.
He exhales through his nose. "Eight months."
Eight months. I got engaged ten months ago. I got engaged, and two months later, he—I set the phone down on the table next to me very carefully, like it's something fragile that matters, which is funny because I feel like the fragile thing right now. Five years of my life wasted, going down the drain.
"It didn't mean anything," Dawson says. "You have to understand that. What we have?—"
"Don't." I hold up a hand. "Don't tell me what we have. Don't."
"You're upset, which is completely reasonable?—"
"I'm upset." I almost laugh. "That's a really interesting word for this."
"Harper, the guests are waiting. We have two hundred people downstairs, and the ceremony starts in fifteen minutes, and if you'll just?—"
