The apartment had a rhythm now, and Feby was ashamed of how quickly she'd learned it by heart.

Alex left before she woke. He came home after dark. And every night he set two hundred dollars on the counter-sometimes three-peeled off whatever the day had paid him, without being asked, the way another man might take off his shoes at the door.

Like it was nothing. Like it didn't cost him twelve hours of his body to earn it.

She'd stopped arguing around the fourth night. There was a certain kind of stubbornness that wasn't worth fighting, and his was cut from the same stone as her father's had been.

Or so she imagined. She'd never known her father well enough to be sure, and that small hollow ache surfaced at the strangest times - like now, watching money she hadn't asked for sit quietly on a counter that wasn't really hers.

She was at the little table doing what she'd done every night for a week - filling out another application, this one for an assistant coordinator role two rungs below anything the Rydell document would accept — when the knock came.

Late. Three sharp raps, evenly spaced. Knuckles that had never once knocked and waited to be wanted.

She opened the door to her cousin's smile, which was somehow worse than her cousin's scowl.

"Wilhelmina." Feby said it flat. Not a greeting. A weather report.

"Feby." Wilhelmina swept past her without waiting to be asked, taking the apartment in one slow, unhurried circuit - the narrow kitchen, the single window, the mattress just visible through the half-open bedroom door - with the specific thoroughness of a woman pricing a property she had no intention of buying. "So this is it. I'd heard, but I didn't quite "

She let the sentence die there, and the dying did more work than finishing it would have. Her face finished it anyway.

Every downward flick of her eyes said it plainly: you actually live in this cheap little place.

Behind her came a man Feby didn't recognize. Tall, dressed in a gray that never seemed to wrinkle, smiling before anyone had introduced him.

And behind him, Leon, hands in his pockets, already looking around the room like he was cataloguing it for later use.

"My fiancé," Wilhelmina said, without turning. "Julian Thorne. Julian - my cousin. The one I told you about."

"The one you told him about." Feby kept her voice level. It took effort. "Wonderful."

Julian took her hand before she'd offered it, held it one beat longer than any greeting required, and said, "Wilhelmina undersells you," in a tone that made the compliment feel like something she'd need to wash off.

Feby took her hand back.

Alex stood at the counter, sleeves still pushed up from the day, a line of dust along his forearm he hadn't gotten to yet. He said nothing.

He watched the three of them arrange themselves in the small room the way a man watches weather — not alarmed. Just noting which direction it was moving.

Leon noticed him last, which was its own kind of insult. "Alex." He said the name like he was trying it on for size. "Still jobless?"

"He has a job," Feby said, faster than she meant to.

"What job?" Leon's mouth curled. "Hauling freight at the port? That's not work, cousin. That's what you do with an animal."

"Every honest job is a good job." The words came out of her hot, and she heard it, and she didn't care.

But Leon had already turned back to his real entertainment. "Long day?" he asked Alex, pleasant as poison.

"Long enough," Alex said.

"You smell like it." Wilhelmina offered this brightly, the way she might mention rain coming, and didn't wait for a reaction. She turned back to Feby. "We were in the neighborhood. Julian wanted to see where you'd ended up."

"I didn't end up anywhere. This is where I live."

"Of course." Wilhelmina's eyes made one more slow lap of the apartment and landed, deliberately, on Alex. "It suits you both. Small. Like a cage for an animal."

Something in Feby's chest went very still and very hot at the same time. Not for herself — she'd been swallowing her cousin's contempt for years, it barely had a taste anymore.

For him. For the man who'd worked twelve hours and come home and put money on the counter and asked for nothing.

She opened her mouth. Then she caught the look on Alex's face - calm, almost bored and closed it again.

He didn't need defending. She was starting to suspect he never had.

Leon cleared his throat, that old maneuver he'd always used to steer a room back where he wanted it. "Actually, cousin, we came with something useful. You remember Wendell Ashcombe."

"I remember the name."

"Good family. Old money — the real kind, the kind that doesn't have to explain itself." He said it easily, like the mention alone was a gift. "He's asked about you. More than once. I told him about your situation."

His eyes flicked to Alex, then away, as if the word situation covered him too. "A man like that could solve a great deal, Feby. Quietly. No thirty-day nonsense. No manager's chair you'll never actually land."

"I didn't ask for a man like that to solve anything."

"No," Leon agreed, pleasant as ever. "But you might want to start thinking like a rich man's wife. His door is always open for you."

Feby opened her mouth to answer and found Julian already at her elbow - somehow, without her having tracked the two steps it took him to cross the room.

He'd angled his back to Wilhelmina, who had drifted to the window and was loudly inspecting the kitchen shelf, announcing to no one in particular that she wouldn't survive a single night in a place like this.

"For what it's worth," Julian said, low, meant only for her, "Leon's overselling Ashcombe. And underselling the actual problem."

He smiled like this was a kindness. "Your inheritance isn't a thirty-day problem. It's a four-year problem, and you've been fighting it alone. I have connections your family doesn't. Real ones. I could help you win this properly — not some manager's chair you have to beg for. The whole estate. Cleanly. The way it should have gone to you in the first place."

His eyes held hers a moment too long. "All I'd need is a little more time with you. To get to know the situation properly."

The words slid over her skin like a hand she hadn't invited.

"You're engaged to my cousin."

"That's not really an answer to what I offered."

"It's the only one you're getting."

Something in his smile thinned. Just slightly — and there it was, the first honest expression he'd shown since walking in. "You might want to think it over before you're too proud to change your mind."

"I've thought it over." Feby stepped back, putting the width of the small room between them, which wasn't much.

But it was hers. "The answer's still no. To both of you."

She looked past him to Leon. "Tell Mr. Ashcombe I'm not interested."

Then, a glance at Wilhelmina, still at the window, apparently absorbed in the street below. "And tell your sister that if she wants to know what her fiancé does when she's not in the room, she should stand a little closer."

The silence that followed had a shape to it. Edges.

Wilhelmina turned from the window slowly. "What does that mean."

"Ask him," Feby said.

Julian's charm didn't fall away so much as recalibrate, mid-motion, into something flatter. "She's upset, that's all this is. Wilhelmina, I was only being polite about her situation-"

"Don't worry, I know exactly what she is." Wilhelmina looked at Feby for a long moment, something unreadable moving behind her eyes — not doubt, Feby noticed. Not even surprise.

"She's never once been grateful to the people trying to help her. Not to my parents. Not to this family. Not once."

She lifted her chin. "I'm telling you, cousin — whatever Julian offers you, take it. He comes from real money. The kind you'll never see again."

"You're unbelievable, Wilhelmina." Feby's voice didn't rise. It dropped, which was worse. "See yourself out. None of you are welcome here."

"This animal cage isn't a home." Wilhelmina laughed, and her eyes fell on the table. "And look at you - still filling out little applications. Sweetheart. No one is going to hire you."

Her hand moved once, almost lazy, and swept every page off the table.

The papers scattered across the floor.

A week of nights. A week of hoping in careful block letters, lying on the boards of a rented room while her cousin smiled down at them. Feby's breath stopped somewhere behind her ribs and stayed there.

Leon looked between the three of them like a man recalculating an equation that

had just changed shape. "This was supposed to be a friendly visit. A family visit."

"It stopped being one about a minute after you walked in."

It was the first thing Alex had said in a long while, and every head in the room turned

toward him at once. He hadn't moved from the counter. He didn't need to.

"You can see yourselves out. Before I have to move three of you out."

Nobody argued.

Wilhelmina went first, spine straight, heels loud. Julian followed a step behind her with the particular haste of a man recalculating his evening.

Leon lingered in the doorway half a second longer, glanced at Alex, then at Feby,

and seemed to weigh whatever he'd meant to say against the man still standing at the counter.

He said it anyway, from the safety of the hall. "You're throwing away the chance of a lifetime, cousin. A rich life. A happy one. For this jobless man."

The door clicked shut behind him.

Feby stood very still in the middle of her own apartment, listening to three sets of

footsteps recede down the stairs, waiting for her heartbeat to remember its ordinary

speed.

Then she knelt and started gathering the pages.

"You didn't have to do that," she said finally, not looking up. "I could have thrown

them out myself."

"You did throw them out." Alex

crossed the room, picked up the application she'd been working smoothed it once, and set it back on

the table exactly where he'd found it.

"I just closed the door after you."

She almost smiled. It surprised her, how close it came — right there, in the

wreckage of an evening that had gone as badly as evenings go.

"They'll come back," she said. "One of them, at least. People like that don't stop asking just because you say no once."

"I know." He said it without any particular weight, the way he might agree it would probably rain later. "Then you do the same thing you did tonight. You follow what your heart already knows."

She looked at him for a moment

the dust still on his sleeve, the exhaustion he wore as plainly as the

borrowed shirt, and underneath all of it that stillness nothing tonight had managed to touch and she did not ask the question rising in her throat, the one she'd been swallowing for weeks now.

Where does a man learn to stand like that?

She filed it away instead, the way she'd learned to file away most things about him,

and went back to her application.

Across the room, his tile lit up. He read the message once, face unchanged.

Tomorrow, come to the Knight office. We have the identity of five who attacked you

— and the one who paid them to do it.