Chapter 9

The cruelty of the remark hung in the small room like a toxic fog. Tim stepped out, heading toward Neil's office not out of brotherly love, but out of the sheer necessity of managing a potential PR disaster. Olivia followed at a distance, her fingers trembling against her navy scarf.

Neil's office was a sterile, lonely shadow compared to Tim's mahogany palace. He was lying on the carpet, his pale skin translucent under the fluorescent lights. His gold-rimmed glasses lay broken a few feet away, making him look disturbingly young and vulnerable.

Tim didn't kneel. He didn't even touch him with his hands. He crouched — with the reluctant precision of a man approaching something he found medically objectionable — and pressed exactly two fingers, index and middle, to Neil's wrist. Three seconds. Then he straightened, withdrew the folded pocket square from his breast pocket, and wiped those two fingers with slow, methodical thoroughness.

"Stop faking," he said flatly. "Get up."

The family doctor arrived minutes later. After a quick, professional check, he looked up at Tim with a bewildered expression. "It's low blood sugar, sir. And... extreme physical exhaustion. It looks like he hasn't eaten a thing all day and has been pushing his body past its absolute limits."

"Exhaustion? From what?" Tim scoffed, already checking his watch. "He's a ghost in this building. He doesn't do a thing."

Olivia stood at the back of the cluster of gossiping staff and processed this information the way she processed everything about Neil: as a move.

He staged it. The timing was too perfect — Tim one breath away from looking at that bruise, and suddenly Neil collapses and the whole office pivots. She had to admire the mechanics of it. He had not only escaped Tim's attention, he had made himself the sympathetic figure in the room. The doctor's verdict about exhaustion was probably real, she conceded, but the collapse — the timing of the collapse — that was authored.

She was so busy constructing the explanation that she did not pause on the word the doctor had used. Extreme. She did not think about the food that had arrived at exactly the right time this morning, ordered by someone who had been awake before her, who had not yet eaten. She did not connect these facts.

She had a framework. The framework was: Neil Rolston does nothing accidentally. Therefore this was deliberate. Therefore she understood it.

She was wrong about the parts that mattered. But she had no way to know that yet.

As the orderlies lifted Neil toward a gurney, his eyes flickered open for a fraction of a second. He found Olivia in the crowd.

He didn't look weak. He looked at her — and with a precision that only she could see, he gave her a slow, wicked wink.

Then his lips moved in a silent, perfectly legible question: Ollie. Was it good?

She turned away, her face burning with fury and something else she refused to name.

There it is. The wink confirmed everything. Staged, deliberate, satisfied. He had orchestrated the whole thing and was now checking in on whether his delivery order had hit the mark.

She was absolutely certain she had him figured out.

I'll give you congee, she thought, already planning it on the cab ride home, already knowing which brand of rice she had in her apartment. I'll give you enough congee to drown in.

Her phone buzzed.

[Rabid]: I want sweet congee tonight. The kind Ollie makes.

She stared at the message. Then she put her phone in her pocket.

She hadn't agreed. She hadn't responded.

She was already thinking about whether she had ginger.

At 6:00 PM, the city was a gridlock of orange sunset and exhaust fumes.

Olivia stood at the curb, watching Tim’s black Maybach pull away. He was heading to a high-stakes dinner with a mistress on his arm, and as usual, he hadn't even looked back to see how his "fiancée" was getting home.

Fine. The further I am from that walking block of ice, the better, she thought, pushing her heavy glasses up her nose.

She pulled out her phone and checked her messages. A text from her brother, Morgan, was sitting at the top of her feed like a parasite:

[Morgan]: Sis, I saw some limited edition sneakers. Only $12k. Send me the cash. [Morgan]: Mom says since you're with the Rolstons now, you don't need your share of the family dividend anyway. Don't be greedy.

Olivia’s eyes went arctic. Her family was a pack of leeches, and she was the only blood supply left. The Rolstons hadn't given her a cent of their fortune, yet her own parents were already stripping her of her grandfather's legacy.

A black sedan pulled up to the curb. She checked the app. Plate ending in AU86; driver ID ending in 0921.

"Correct," she muttered, sliding into the back seat. "Drop-off at the Westside district.”

The driver was a shadow—low-profile baseball cap, black mask, and a silence that felt heavy. He didn't speak, just gave a curt nod before pulling into traffic.

As they hit the main artery, Olivia’s "Midnight Rose" instincts screamed to life. This wasn't a normal rideshare driver. He was weaving through the evening gridlock with the surgical precision of a professional racer, finding gaps that shouldn't exist by the laws of physics. He bypassed the navigation’s "fastest route" to take a series of obscure, narrow back-alleys that only a local—or a stalker—would know.

The car stopped directly in front of her apartment unit—not the main gate, but her specific door.

"How did you get past the gate?" Olivia asked, her hand moving toward the pepper spray in her bag.

"I bought the property management company this morning," Neil stated casually, pulling off the mask.

The driver turned off the engine. "We’re here.”

The voice. Even muffled by the mask, it was a low, melodic rasp that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up.

Olivia lunged forward, ripping the mask off his face.

Neil Rolston blinked at her, his gold-rimmed glasses reflecting the dim streetlights. He looked delighted, like a child who had successfully jumped out of a closet to scare someone.

"Neil! You're supposed to be in a hospital bed!"

"I got bored," he said, vaulting fluidly over the center console to cage her into the corner of the back seat with effortless, terrifying strength. "And I missed my Ollie. Did you like the ride? I thought you’d appreciate a driver who actually knows how to handle a curve.

Olivia thrashed, but he was like a furnace, his abnormally high body heat seeping through her clothes. "This is stalking, Neil. It’s literal, professional-grade stalking.”

"It’s efficient," he countered, leaning in to steal a kiss from the corner of her mouth. "Now go inside. Make that congee. I’ll be up in twenty minutes.

He patted her cheek and let her go. "Wait for me, Ollie.”

Olivia scrambled out of the car, her heart racing for all the wrong reasons.

She was halfway to the building entrance when she noticed the car that had been behind them the entire drive. It hadn’t parked. It hadn’t moved on. It sat at the curb, engine idling, facing her.

She kept walking.

She did not look back.