I’m not sure how long I’ve been staring at my phone before I finally click the dial button. Silas picks up almost immediately, before I’ve even figured out what to say to him.
“Something is wrong,” he murmurs when I don’t speak up straight away, his usual mocking tone absent. “What happened, Dion?”
I sigh and glance out my office window. “Careful,” I murmur. “You sound so concerned that I might start to believe we’re friends.”
Silas chuckles. “We are,” he says simply. “Tell me what happened so we can fix it.”
“I’m not sure,” I admit. “It’s Faye.”
He falls silent then. “Had it been any of your brothers, I’d have worried you were calling with some kind of dumb unreasonable request,” he says, his tone light. “Ares called me with a weird request once, you know? It was long before he knew he’d be marrying Raven. He asked me to put bodyguards on her secretly because he’d been so worried about her safety. He was too stupid to realize his concern far outweighed what is acceptable between friends.”
I smile, my mood lifting slightly. That sounds exactly like the kind of thing Ares would do.
“And Luca once called to ask me which restaurant Valentina was going to on a date, only to buy the entire place and crash the date. This was after he tried to enforce a company-wide dating ban to stop it from happening, mind you.”
This time I chuckle, and it strikes me then — he’s trying to cheer me up. In his own way, he’s trying to tell me I’m not the first Windsor to call him with a potentially strange request relating to my wife.
“Every fiber of my being is telling me something is wrong with her, but I don’t know what it is. She seemed fine after the wedding. Things were better than I’d even dared hope for, until I went on a trip to Canada for the weekend. I came home to find her… in a precarious mental state. She seemed more broken than ever before, more so than she had been in the months leading up to our wedding.”
“Were there any signs that something was wrong before you left?”
I hesitate. “Yes. She seemed reluctant to perform that weekend, but I hadn’t given it much thought and left anyway.” I pause, a hint of contempt running down my spine. Did she see Eric at her performance? Or did she sneak away to meet him while I was in Canada?
“Your grandmother requested invisible but impenetrable protection for her from the very second you were married,” he says quietly. “She’s been more restless about Faye than she has been about Raven or Val, so I oversaw your wife personally while you were away. There were only three people she came into contact with in that time: your driver, your housekeeper, and her father. She didn’t linger after her performance. Faye went straight home and didn’t leave the house until you came back.”
I nod, uncertain. “She denied anything was wrong, but something triggered her,” I murmur. Her behavior was too similar to my own in the past, and I’d recognize that kind of despondency no matter how hard she tried to hide it. She hadn’t been like that in Hawaii or in the week prior, when we’d been wrapped up in each other, both of us trying to get used to our marriage in our own ways. When I came back from Canada, it was almost as though she’d lost all hope and wished despair would swallow her whole. It terrified me, because what I saw in her eyes was the same kind of sorrow that nearly stole me away from my family. “I want you to watch her closely. If she steps foot outside of our house, I want eyes on her. I’m not sure what kind of threat I’m looking for, but I can feel it, Silas. Something is wrong.”
“We’ll get to the bottom of this,” he murmurs, his tone conveying his concern. “In the meantime, you should work on earning her trust. She’s your wife, Dion. You shouldn’t have to spy on her like this.”
“I know,” I murmur, my heart twisting painfully. I did this. I enforced so much distance between us she won’t even tell me what made her play until her fingers bled. She’ll give me her body freely, but no more than that, and I only have myself to blame.
Initially, I thought it must’ve been about Eric, but the longer I think about it, the less likely it seems. If she’d loved him enough to inspire such despair, she wouldn’t have ridden me the way she did. She wouldn’t have let me near her like that at all, and she certainly wouldn’t have looked me in the eye as she came for me twice. I don’t think it was him she was referring to when she told me she needed to forget.
I’m still lost in thought an hour later when Maria walks into my office. “Dion?” she says, startling me. Her expression tells me she’s been trying to get my attention for a while now, and I sigh as I straighten in my seat.
She walks toward me with a folder in her hands, only to pause in the middle of the room. She slowly twirls around, her eyes roaming over the walls. “This office is so different from your smaller one in London,” she murmurs. “I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to this.”
“Yeah,” I sigh. “Me too.” It’s been quite an adjustment, and not just because of Faye. Coming back has been more complicated than I thought it’d be. For a little while, I deluded myself into thinking I’d escaped my demons, only to find them waiting for me the moment I returned home.
Maria stares at me, her expression forlorn, and guilt instantly starts to eat at me. “Maria, you know you didn’t have to come with me, right? I know I’m asking a lot of you, and all of your friends and family live in London. I’d understand if you wanted to stay there. Just say the word, and I’ll write you a glowing letter of recommendation.”
She looks down for a moment, her short blonde hair brushing over her shoulders. “You never asked,” she says, her tone different to usual. “I offered to come with you, but I wish you’d asked.”
We’ve been working together for nearly ten years now, having met at university. In all that time, she’s always been professional. Today is the first time she’s showing me some vulnerability, and I’m not sure how to handle it.
“I’m grateful,” I say eventually. “I hope you know that.”
Maria nods and pastes a smile on to her face, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “Of course. You wouldn’t last a day without me, you know?”
I study her for a moment, trying to decipher her mellow mood. It wouldn’t surprise me if she’s homesick. “I won’t hold it against you if you change your mind, Maria. If you want to move back, I’ll fully support you.”
She looks away and grimaces. “No,” she says, her voice soft. “I want to be by your side. There’s so much left to do with the relocation and our existing contracts, and it’ll be tough on you. You can’t do everything alone, Dion. It’s okay to rely on people every once in a while.”
I nod. “I do rely on you.”
“Not as much as I want you to,” she murmurs, before shaking her head and pasting on that professional expression I’ve grown accustomed to. “I actually came in to bring you the budgets for the Windsor Staccato Foundation,” she tells me, before I have a chance to respond to her earlier comment.
I frown. “Shouldn’t this have been given to Faye?”
Maria freezes, surprise flashing through her eyes. “The foundation has always been important to you, so I figured you’d want the final say. You never even wanted your grandmother to interfere with it more than she needed to.”
I purse my lips as I take the folder from her, my mind already trailing back to Faye. Perhaps this would be a good distraction for her, something to give her purpose. She’s thrown herself into the administrative work behind our charities, but perhaps a more active role would be good for her. I think she’d love to teach. I’ll have to suggest it to her.
“Dion?”
I look up and raise my brows.
“You always said your marriage was just a familial obligation, and that you couldn’t care less who you married. For years, you acted that way too. Did something change?”
I frown, confused by her question. Maria is probably my only friend other than Xavier, so it isn’t entirely out of the ordinary for her to ask me this, but somehow, it doesn’t sit well with me. “Why do you ask?”
She looks into my eyes, a weak smile on her lips. “I was just curious,” she says. “I want you to be happy. Being forced into a marriage with someone you don’t really know, someone who is far too young to truly be your equal, it just seems… I’m just worried you’ll end up settling for less than you deserve. Making the best of a bad situation isn’t the same as pursuing true happiness.”
I look away. “I would never cheat on my wife,” I tell her, my voice harsh. “So my only choice is to make the best of it and give my marriage a chance.”
“For now,” Maria says, her tone sharp. “In three years, you’ll have complied with your grandmother’s terms, and you’ll be able to divorce her. Then what? Three years will fly by.”
Unease runs down my spine, and I look away. I always knew I’d marry Faye, and I never considered that it didn’t have to be forever. I always assumed I’d only marry once in my life, yet twice now, I’ve been reminded that I could lose her.
Maria shoots me a sweet smile before walking out, leaving me with my spiraling thoughts. It never occurred to me that I truly may have to let Faye go in three years.
