Chapter 56

Mira’s POV

Zara’s couch had a spring that dug into your lower back if you shifted too far left, the television remote only worked if you held it at a specific angle, and her neighbor played music at 7am like it was a personal mission from God.

I had never loved a place more in my entire life.

It had been five days since the gala. Five days since I’d walked out of that venue in a dress Alejandro picked for me, which felt cruel in hindsight, like being handed something beautiful right before someone took it away.

I hadn’t gone back to his house. I’d sent Zara for my things while he was out and she’d done it without a single lecture, which meant she understood that I was hanging by a thread and pestering me would snap it.

I appreciated that about her more than I’d said.

“You need to eat actual food,” she announced, appearing from the kitchen holding a plate like evidence in a court case. “Toast is not a meal, Mira.”

“Toast is a lifestyle,” I muttered without moving from the couch.

“You’ve had it for breakfast and dinner two days in a row.”

“It’s consistent. I respect consistency.”

She dropped the plate on the coffee table in front of me and sat on the arm of the chair across from it, crossing her arms and looking at me with that specific Zara expression that meant she was choosing her next words carefully.

“Have you thought about calling him?” she asked.

“No,” I said immediately.

“Mira.”

“Zara.” I finally pushed myself upright, pulling my knees to my chest. “He knew. He had to have known. His father doesn’t make announcements like that without telling him first, that is not how James Montenegro operates and we both know it.”

“Or,” she said carefully, “he genuinely didn’t know, which would explain why he looked like he wanted to put his fist through a wall when it happened.”

“He picked out my dress,” I said, and my voice came out quieter than I meant it to. “He picked it out that morning, Zara. He put it in a box and slid it across the bed and watched me open it and he already knew what his father was going to say that night.” I shook my head slowly. “What kind of person does that?”

She didn’t have an answer for that.

Neither did I, really.

I reached for the toast.

The doorbell saved us from the particular brand of painful silence we’d fallen into, and Zara stood up with a small frown, disappearing into the hallway. I heard the door open, heard her pause, then heard a voice I recognized.

I closed my eyes briefly.

Ace appeared in the doorway a moment later, hands in his pockets, hair slightly disheveled the way it always was, his glasses sitting a little crooked on his face. He looked at me on the couch with my plate of toast and my borrowed oversized shirt and he didn’t say a word about any of it.

“Hey,” he said simply, after disappearing since the vacation all he said was hey.

“How did you know I was here,” I replied.

“Zara.”

I shot her a look as she reappeared behind him. She gave me an unapologetic shrug and went back to the kitchen with the energy of someone who had made a decision and was very comfortable with it.

Ace came and sat on the other end of the couch, not too close, giving me the space he always somehow knew I needed. That was the thing about Ace, he read rooms quietly and acted accordingly, which was either a very good quality or a very dangerous one depending on the day.

“You didn’t have to come,” I shrugged. “You should have just stayed in whatever hole you were hiding in.”

“I know,” he replied easily. “I wanted to.”

I looked at him sideways. He was staring at the television, which wasn’t even on, and there was something sitting in his expression that I couldn’t fully read.

“I know about the past, Mira,” he said quietly, not turning to look at me.

My stomach tightened.

“What past?” I questioned carefully.

Now he looked at me, steady and direct. “The club. Scarlett’s. All of it.”

The silence that followed was the kind that had weight to it.

“How?” I asked, and my voice came out completely flat.

“I did some digging a while back,” he admitted. “When I first started having feelings for you, I wanted to understand who you were. Where you’d come from.”

He paused. “I know that probably sounds insane.”

“It sounds like an invasion of privacy,” I said.

“It was,” he agreed without flinching. “And I’m not asking you to be okay with that. I’m just telling you because I’m done keeping things from you when everyone else seems to be doing exactly that.”

I stared at him.

“I don’t care about any of it,” he continued, turning to face me fully now. “Not Scarlett’s, not any of it. You survived something terrible and you came out the other side and that is the only part of that story that matters to me.”

Something in my chest shifted uncomfortably.

“Ace,” I started.

“I’m not finished,” he said, not unkindly. “Alejandro knew too. His father made sure of that before he hired you. He had a file on you, Mira, a full one, and he sat on it and said nothing, and now he’s letting his father marry him off to someone else while you’re sleeping on Zara’s couch.”

He held my gaze. “I’m not that person. I would never be that person to you.”

The problem with Ace was that he meant every single word he said.

That was the thing that made this complicated.

“You deserve someone who knows everything about you and stays anyway,” he said quietly. “Without the games. Without the bets.”

I went very still.

“What bets?” I said slowly.

Something crossed his face. Brief and regretful.

“Ace,” I said, my voice dropping. “What bets?”

He exhaled slowly, rubbing the back of his neck, and I felt the dread start to build in my stomach before he even opened his mouth.

“That came out wrongly,” he started carefully, “all I’m trying to say is, even though you’ve sold your body for money before, I’m here for you.

The room went very quiet.

I sat there with Zara’s borrowed shirt and my cold toast and I let that sentence rearrange everything inside me into something I didn’t have a name for yet.

Why did I think he’d see me in a different light?

Stupid. So stupid.

“Get out,” I said softly.

Ace blinked. “Mira—”

“Not you,” I said, pressing my fingers to my eyes. “Just.

Give me a minute.”

He went quiet.

I sat there in the silence and felt something harden in my chest that had nothing to do with my condition.

If he saw me as a prostitute, then what about Alejandro?

What will he think of me when he eventually finds out?