Adrian’s POV
Lolita drives with one hand on the wheel, the other holding a cigarette, smoke curling out the cracked window in lazy spirals. The city bleeds past us in a blur of gray concrete and winter-bare trees, but I barely see it.
My mind is still back in that restaurant, replaying the conversation we just finished.
The meeting was about Cassian. I'm not leaving anything to chance. Sophie may be conflicted about pressing charges, her conscience wrestling with mercy I'll never understand, but I have no such hesitation.
Cassian Harrison fed information to a woman who terrorized the person I love. He smiled at Sophie over dinner while plotting her destruction. Whatever feelings he claims to have had for her, whatever justifications he's constructed, he made his choices.
Now he'll live with the consequences.
Lolita has connections, the kind that don't appear in any directory, the kind built over decades of knowing the right people and keeping the right secrets.
She's agreed to help ensure Cassian's trial goes a certain way—not through anything as crude as bribery, but through the subtle art of influence. A word in the right ear, information surfacing at the right moment. The legal system has always been a game, and Lolita knows how to play.
Her reasons for helping remain her own. I didn't ask, and she didn't offer. That's always been our arrangement—transactions without explanations, favors without emotional entanglement.
I don't care about her motives. I care about results.
"You're quiet," Lolita observes, her voice carrying that familiar blend of amusement and detachment. "Usually after a productive meeting, you're already planning three steps ahead. Instead, you're brooding like a teenager whose prom date stood him up."
"I'm thinking."
She takes a long drag from her cigarette, exhaling toward the cracked window. "Thinking leads to doubt. Doubt leads to hesitation. And hesitation, my dear Adrian, is how men like you get destroyed."
I don't respond. She's not wrong, but she's also not saying anything I don't already know.
As we approach the hospital, Lolita slows the car. Her manicured finger gestures toward the building, toward the window I know belongs to Sophie's room.
"Look."
I follow her gaze—and my stomach drops.
Paparazzi. A cluster of them, maybe eight or ten, camped beneath the hospital entrance with long lenses and the patient hunger of predators waiting for prey. They've set up like it's a stakeout—folding chairs, coffee thermoses, cameras mounted on tripods.
One of them is smoking, laughing at something his companion said. Another is scrolling through his phone, probably checking whether any competitors have gotten a shot he missed.
They're waiting for her. For Sophie. For the scandal's leading lady to appear at a window, to be wheeled outside for fresh air, to give them anything they can sell to the highest bidder.
"They found her room," I say, the words hollow.
Lolita exhales smoke, watching me with those knowing eyes that have always seen too much. She doesn't say ‘I told you so,’ she doesn't need to. The message is clear in the slight curve of her lips, the arch of her brow.
‘This is beyond what you can handle alone.’
I can't be everywhere. Can't watch Sophie every moment. Can't shield her from a world that's already decided she's entertainment, that's reduced her suffering to content.
It will chase her relentlessly until something more interesting comes along—or until they've wrung every last drop of pain from her story.
"Shall I circle the block?" Lolita asks. "Give you time to compose yourself before facing your pregnant damsel?"
"Drop me at the side entrance."
She complies without comment, pulling around the building to a service door that most visitors don't know exists. I learned about it days ago, when the first photographers started sniffing around. One more adaptation to a life that's become unrecognizable.
Before I exit the car, Lolita's hand catches my arm. Her grip is surprisingly strong, her nails pressing crescents into my sleeve.
"Be careful, Adrian." Her voice has lost its usual sardonic edge. "The protector role suits you poorly. It requires a kind of vigilance that burns through men like fire through paper. And you…" She releases my arm, retrieving her cigarette. "You've always been prone to burning."
I don't answer. I close the door and watch her drive away, smoke trailing from her window like a departing ghost.
The side entrance is mercifully empty. I step inside, but I don't go to Sophie's room, not yet.
Instead, I find a quiet corner of the parking garage, sit in my parked car with the engine off. The silence presses in, and with it comes the weight of everything I can't control.
I haven't felt this helpless since I was twenty-three, since the year everything fell apart the first time.
The memory surfaces before I can stop it—a name I haven't spoken in years, a face I've tried to forget, buried alongside all the other wreckage from my twenties.
The years after Lolita left me hollowed out and reckless. When I stopped caring about what happened to me, I stopped caring about the future I'd been building.
I dropped out of my doctoral program, started drinking too much, sleeping too little. Became the kind of man my mother couldn't recognize and my father finally had use for.
Marcus Lewis—my father, a man who ran an organization that operated in shadows—moving money, moving goods, moving problems. He'd been waiting for me to break, for the moment when his brilliant, academic son would finally become an asset instead of an embarrassment.
I fell into his world like water finding a crack in stone. Slowly at first, then all at once. I discovered I was good at it—the coldness Lolita cultivated in me translated well to intimidation.
My intellect made me valuable. Within a year, I was deep inside operations I couldn't have imagined as a graduate student.
That's when I met him—the man whose name is burning in my mind right now. We were the same age, give or take. Both lost, both dangerous, both convinced we were untouchable. We became close—brothers in everything but blood.
He watched my back, and I watched his. In that world, loyalty was the only currency that mattered, and we were wealthy with it.
Then a job went wrong—a deal with the wrong people. I went against my father's orders, and the cost was everything—my relationship with my family, my standing in the only world I knew, the identity I'd been building for years.
I had to cut every tie, disappear, rebuild myself from nothing. Professor Adrian Lewis. The man I became. The mask I've worn for over a decade.
Now that old life is whispering again.
I could make one call. Just one. He owes me—will always owe me, for what I sacrificed to pull him from that hell. He has skills I need, connections, the ability to watch over Sophie in ways I can't, to see threats coming before they arrive.
My thumb hovers over the contact, waits. Then I lock the phone, shove it back in my pocket.
No. I'm done with that world. Once you're in, you don't leave—not really, not cleanly. I was lucky to survive it once, lucky to build something new from the ashes of who I was. Calling him would be opening a door I sealed with my own blood.
I climb out of the car. Start walking toward the hospital entrance.
But the thought won't stop circling.
Those paparazzi outside Sophie's window. The comments are multiplying online. The trial is coming for Cassian, the institution swallowing Lisette, the world pressing in from every direction.
I can't be everywhere. Can't watch her every moment.
But he could.