Page 89 of Modern Romance January 2025 5-8

“Pitbull,” she said. “I knew it.”

“You said pitbulls weren’t that aggressive.”

“Mostly, they aren’t. Like I said, they’re reactionary. But when they’re abused... They get mean.”

“Apt, then,” he said.

She seemed to be sitting with the revelation, though her next question wasn’t about Seraphina. “Why let the media think you’re... Simple?”

“Because I prefer to be unknowable. All evidence suggests that can’t possibly be true, doesn’t it? It’s amusing, I think, that they see me as being something so utterly unthreatening.”

“It allows you to move in the open,” she said.

“Yes. Exactly. And in the end, I cannot imagine a more poetic headline. My father’s fool of a son putting him out of business. Better that I’m not thought of as ruthless or brilliant or exacting. It makes my father’s eventual downfall that much more humiliating for him.”

“You thought of everything,” she said.

“Absolutely everything,” he repeated. “Except what I’ll do when it’s finished.”

“Won’t you just... Live?”

“Maybe,” he said. But he didn’t mean it.

The truth was, he was accomplished at numbing the pain. At blunting his grief with alcohol, with sex. He didn’t touch drugs, because they had been the undoing of Seraphina, and he would never line the pockets of any of the people who had sold her illegal substances, he would never contribute to that trade. It had less to do with treating his own body like a temple of any kind and more to do with the festering rot of the industry.

“You can have a life, you know,” she said.

“My sister doesn’t,” he said. “You can see where my dilemma is.”

“Do you think that maybe it’s not a great tribute to her to not live at all?”

“And what would you know about that?”

“I know about grief. Whether you can compare the two or not.”

“Comparison is the thief of joy, I hear.”

“My mother died,” she said. “When I was eighteen. I never knew my father. She was the only parent that I had.”

“I’m sorry. Let me tell you, a bad father is worse than no father.”

“I suppose so,” she said. “Neither of us would really know.”

He nodded slowly. She had been alone in the world at eighteen. And she didn’t seem to come from means. He wondered how she had navigated that. What she had done. He didn’t ask.

It explained her. The determination, the scrap.

“We should land soon,” she said. “Maybe I’ll try to do some work.”

“Is your computer in here?”

“Yes. I’ll just... Sit over here.”

And she did, at a desk in the corner of the room, working away, and he watched. Fascinated by her. By the focus that she gave to what she did. There was definitely more fire to her than he had ever seen when she was simply acting as his flight attendant. But she wasn’t an entirely different person. She interested him more than he would like to admit. But he supposed that was a good thing. Because over the next couple of months they were going to spend a lot of time together.

CHAPTER FIVE

AUGGIEDIDN’TTHINKshe breathed properly until they landed in London, and she separated from Matias. She went as quickly as she could to the Your Girl Friday headquarters, in a lovely little office space in London. As soon as she arrived upstairs to their suite, she spread her hands wide and threw her arms up over her head. “I came up with a solution.”