The shower shut off with a low metallic groan, steam curling outward in slow, heavy ribbons that drifted into the cold expanse of Adrian Harrington's room. The man stepping out into that fog was not flesh alone, but the carved silhouette of someone who had been sculpted by sleepless nights and ghosts no water could wash away. He moved with the quiet finality of a blade sheathed in human form—each motion deliberate, exact, stripped of anything unnecessary.
A towel wrapped around his waist, hair dripping against his temples, he padded silently across the marble floor. Water droplets trailed behind him like a phantom's footprints—here, then gone a second later on the heated tiles.
He wasn't thinking of her.He wasn't thinking of anyone.
Thoughts, when they came, belonged to the dead—mother's laugh echoing in the kitchen when he was ten, father's gruff pride the day he was accepted to Harvard, their last arguments months before the kidnapping, all of which had been meant to push him, guide him… not abandon him.
Not end like that.
Every memory was a blade. Every recollection a wound reopening.
He pushed them away. He had learned to. Pain was a constant presence now—like a shadow trailing behind his every step—but he learned to walk without letting it break him.
He slipped into a clean shirt—tight on his shoulders now, tailored to the body he had forged in exile from sleep—and buttoned it with the same mechanical precision he used when signing off billion-dollar acquisitions. Then he moved toward the walk-in closet again, intending to hang his towel and gather the final items needed for his overnight work.
He froze.
Just for a moment.
It was so subtle anyone else would have missed it—the slight halt of a breath, the tiny pause of a heartbeat. But for Adrian, who had been honed into hypervigilance by the weeks in captivity when every sound signaled danger, the shift in the air was unmistakable.
Something was wrong.
Something had been touched.
His eyes narrowed—not with anger, but with the cold, controlled alertness of a man who no longer believed in safety inside his own home. He stepped into the closet quietly, scanning the room from top to bottom the way he'd been taught by CIA investigators and private security teams in the aftermath of his rescue.
No signs of intrusion.Everything still in place.
Except—
He saw it.
A thin scrap of fabric on the floor, tucked near the edge of the shelving unit where no wind or motion should have placed it. Ivory silk, delicate, smelling faintly of expensive perfume.
Seraphina's.
He recognized it immediately—he'd seen her wear this one many times. On a night when he'd been particularly clingy, he remembered tugging on it and she'd snapped at him for wrinkling it. Her face had been annoyed, flushed red, eyes sharp like she couldn't bear his adoration on display.
He remembered smiling anyway.
Now, he crouched and picked it up.
The fabric slipped like water between his fingers—light, soft, feminine. An object so entirely out of place in this austere, pristine closet.
He exhaled.
Not sharply.Not angrily.Just long, quiet, tired.
"…So she came in here."
His voice was barely above a whisper, yet the words echoed in the room as though the walls themselves recoiled from the implication.
He didn't clench his fists.He didn't curse.He didn't call for security.
He simply held the scarf and looked around the closet again—with new eyes, with the knowledge that she had stood here, moved here, touched things. She had crossed a line he had drawn firmly, explicitly.
And yet—
He felt no spike of rage.
Only… weariness.
He pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed again, deeper this time, his shoulders sinking just slightly.
"She never listens."
There was no surprise in his tone.Only resignation.
Her presence explained the faint shift in the air he'd sensed earlier—something he'd dismissed because exhaustion had eaten at the edges of his instincts. The disturbance he'd felt in the room hadn't been paranoia. It had been her.
He lifted the scarf to eye level. The faintest shimmer of lavender perfume clung to it. It was the same scent that once drowned him at galas when he trailed after her like an overeager puppy. The same scent she had rolled her eyes at when he asked her its name, because she'd said, "You don't need to know. You'll forget."
He hadn't.Of course he hadn't.
He let out a humorless breath—something that might once have been a laugh if laughter still existed in his life. But whatever softness used to live in him had been scorched away long ago.
Now only ash remained.
He brushed his thumb across the scarf once, absently, like a habit he didn't know he still had. Then he folded it carefully—not tenderly, not reverently, just neatly—and set it atop the small wooden table near the closet door.
He would return it to her tomorrow.He would lock the room after.He would increase the mansion security settings.He would remind the staff—again—that boundaries were not suggestions.
That was the plan his mind began crafting almost instantly.
But for a brief moment—one he would never, ever admit aloud—he stood alone in the center of the closet, feeling something faint, something like a tremor beneath the stone that had become his heart.
Not nostalgia.Not affection.Not longing.
It was something closer to sorrow.
Not because she had trespassed.
But because trespassing was the only way she ever approached him.
It struck him, with quiet cruelty, that she had only cared about him when he was an idiot who worshipped the ground she walked on. Now that he had become… whatever he was now… she came crawling back not for him, but for what he represented.
Power.Influence.Security.
He had no delusions left about her.
Nor about what he was.
He shut the closet light off, the scarf's pale silk shrinking into darkness.
And as he walked out, letting the room fall silent behind him, he murmured—so quietly it was swallowed almost instantly:
"…I really should have ended this sooner."
His footsteps receded down the hall.
The closet remained dark.
The scarf lay still.
And somewhere else in the mansion—trembling, shaken, breathless—Seraphina would not sleep that night, nor any night after, knowing what she had seen and what she had left behind.