Chapter 80
Chapter 80
Mira’s POV
Zara was wearing the good perfume.
Not her everyday one, the one she spritzed automatically every morning without thinking, but the other one, the bottle she kept at the back of her shelf that only came out for specific occasions she’d never formally defined but we both understood perfectly.
I noticed it when she walked past me to answer the door.
I said nothing.
But I noticed.
Marlo came in with wine this time, two bottles, which told me he’d been thinking about tonight longer than a casual visit warranted. He kissed Zara’s cheek in the doorway in a way that landed somewhere between friendly and something else entirely, and she let him in that way she had lately, stepping back but not far, like she’d recalibrated how much space she wanted between them.
“Mira,” he said, spotting me on the couch.
“Marlo,” I replied pleasantly.
He sat down. Zara disappeared to get glasses. The comfortable routine of people who’d done this enough times that it had stopped requiring navigation.
We talked about nothing important for a while.
Zara was at full volume and full wit, which meant she was happy, running commentary on everything from her terrible week at work to a documentary she’d watched about cults that had apparently explained several of her past relationships.
Marlo laughed at the right moments and argued back when she said something outrageous, which was often, and I sat between them and drank my wine and watched.
It was somewhere in the second bottle, when the conversation had loosened and the evening had settled into something comfortable and unhurried, that Zara’s phone rang.
She looked at the screen. “It’s my mother. I have to take this or she’ll assume I’m dead.” She stood up, already moving toward the hallway. “Do not say anything interesting while I’m gone, I want to hear everything.”
She disappeared.
Marlo refilled his glass.
I looked at him.
He felt it and looked back.
“You were going to tell me something,” I said quietly. “The other night. Before Zara came back with the tea.”
Something moved through his expression. He looked at his glass.
“Mira—”
“You said there was a and then stopped,” I continued, keeping my voice even. “I’ve been sitting with that unfinished sentence for days.”
He was quiet.
“If it’s something I need to know,” I said carefully, “I’d rather hear it from you than find it another way.”
Marlo turned his glass slowly in his hands, and I watched the conflict move through him openly, the specific discomfort of a man caught between loyalty to a friend and something that felt increasingly like the wrong kind of loyalty to keep.
“It was before you had feelings for him,” he said finally, his voice low. “I want you to know that first.”
My stomach dropped.
“What was?” I asked.
He looked at me.
And in the two seconds before he opened his mouth I already knew. Didn’t know the details, didn’t know the shape of it, but knew the weight of what was coming the way you knew weather before the sky showed it.
“There was a bet,” he said quietly.
The room went very still.
“Between Alejandro and us,” he continued, not looking away, giving me the respect of the full eye contact even though it was clearly costing him. “The week you started working for him. To get you into bed. Before the contract ended.” He exhaled. “To make a tape.”
I didn’t move.
“I didn’t agree with it,” he said quickly. “For what that’s worth. Danny thought it was funny. Ace—” He stopped.
“Ace what,” I said, and my voice came out completely flat.
“Ace said no initially.” He paused. “But he knew about it, Mira. The whole time. He knew.”
The wine glass in my hand suddenly felt very heavy.
“How long? I asked.
“From the beginning.”
“And the feelings,” I said slowly. “Alejandro’s feelings. Were they—”
“Real,” Marlo said immediately, firmly. “Whatever it started as, what he feels for you is real. I watched it happen. It stopped being a bet before anything—” He stopped again. “But it started as one. And you deserved to know that.”
I looked at him.
At his face carrying the guilt of someone who had been sitting on this for months and had finally put it down somewhere and wasn’t entirely sure the relief was worth what came next.
“Thank you,” I said quietly.
“Mira—”
“For telling me,” I clarified. “Thank you for telling me.”
He nodded once, and said nothing else, because there was nothing else that fit.
Down the hallway I could hear Zara’s voice, the specific cadence of her mother's conversation, the way it always ran long regardless of how she felt about it.
I sat very still on the couch.
Felt the information rearrange everything inside me the way earthquakes rearranged furniture, not destroying the room exactly, just making sure nothing was where you’d left it.
A bet.
Before the feelings. Before the ring. Before the wine red dress and the gala and the proposal on a rooftop and there is nothing I wouldn’t look for if it was yours to find.
Before all of it.
A bet.
Zara’s voice in the hallway got louder for a moment then quieter, moving toward wrapping up.
I looked at Marlo one more time.
He looked back with an expression that already knew what was coming and felt the full weight of having caused it.
I picked up my wine glass and took a long slow sip.
And when Zara reappeared in the doorway bright and apologetic and completely unaware of what she’d missed, I smiled at her with everything I had.
“What did I miss?” she tilted her head.
“Nothing,” I said.
But my hand wasn’t entirely steady when I set the glass down.
And Marlo saw it.
And neither of us said a word.
The thought that I had fallen for a man whom I meant nothing to say in my chest heavily.
I was so stupid
I should have known from the beginning that a man like Alejandro Montenegro could never love a woman like me.