Chapter 5 - The Penthouse Offer
Ten minutes later, Clare sat at her mahogany dining table inside her small, quiet apartment, wrapped in a thick wool bathrobe, holding a steaming mug of black tea. Her hands were still shaking slightly, not from the cold, but from the adrenaline crash settling deep into her bones.
The ring was gone. Evan was gone. Her phone remained powered off on the counter.
For the first time in fourteen months, the apartment felt completely hers. Yet, as she looked around the familiar walls, the silence felt heavy, suffocating, and terrifyingly lonely.
She walked over to the kitchen counter and powered her phone back on.
The screen immediately exploded with a cascade of notifications—thirty-two missed calls from Evan, emails from horrified wedding vendors, and a dozen panicked text messages from her mother asking why Evan had called her sobbing at midnight.
She ignored them all, swiping them away one by one until her thumb hovered over a single message from an unknown encrypted number that had arrived two minutes after she walked through her front door.
“If you need a new set of locks installed tonight, or a place where no one will ever knock on your door uninvited, the guest suite at Duca Tower is currently empty. Sleep well, Clare. — L.”
Clare stared at the screen, her heart skipping an erratic beat.
She walked over to the window, parting the sheer curtains to look down at the street below. Across the avenue, half a block down, the sleek black Lincoln Navigator was still parked by the curb, idling quietly in the rain, its headlights cutting a steady beam through the dark Manhattan night.
Her phone buzzed in her hand again.
This time, it wasn't a text. It was a direct call from Luca’s private office line.
Clare’s breath caught in her throat. She pressed accept and brought the phone to her ear, the ambient hum of the city fading into the quiet sound of Luca’s breathing on the other end of the line.
“You didn't go inside,” Luca’s voice was low, smooth, and laced with quiet authority.
“I went inside, Luca,” Clare said softly, leaning her forehead against the cool glass of the window. “I threw his ring in the gutter, and he’s gone.”
May you like
A brief pause hung over the line, filled only by the crack of static and the distant sound of thunder rolling over the East River.
“Good,” Luca said quietly. Then, before she could reply, he asked a question that made the breath completely stop in her lungs. “How long until you realize that living in a brownstone where a coward can bang on your door is a logistical error I can fix in five minutes?”
