Her thumb trembled over the screen.
Are you okay?
Three words. A simple question from a man she barely knew. It was more real, more honest, than anything Cole had said all morning.
We’ll fix this together.
Cole’s voice was a ghost in the room, promising to rebuild the house he had just burned down. He would be here any minute. He would sit beside her, his arm around her shoulders, a pillar of support while she suffocated. He would be her hero.
Her breath hitched. A choice. For the first time, she saw a sliver of light between the bars of the cage. It wasn’t a door. It was just a crack. But it was there.
She could wait for Cole. Or she could answer the text.
Her thumb moved.
No. I’m not.
She typed another message before she could lose her nerve.
Can you meet me? Cafe Argento. Across from the museum. Now.
She hit send.
The reply was instantaneous.
On my way.
Adrenaline surged through her, sharp and clean. She stood up, grabbed her bag, and walked out of her office. She didn’t look back at the empty folder on her screen.
She passed her assistant’s desk. “Lisa, I have a personal emergency. I have to go. If Cole Anderson comes looking for me, tell him… tell him I went to the IT department downtown.”
It was a clumsy lie, but it was all she had.
She walked out the front doors of the museum, blinking in the sudden sunlight. She didn’t run. She walked with a purpose she hadn’t felt in years. She was walking away from her savior.
The cafe was small and crowded. She found a tiny table in the back corner and sank into a chair, her body shaking. What had she done? This was insane.
Five minutes later, the bell over the door jingled.
Kian walked in. He scanned the room, his shoulders broad under a simple grey t-shirt that did nothing to hide the power in his frame. He looked out of place among the tourists and academics, a predator in a petting zoo.
His eyes found hers. The world seemed to shrink.
He crossed the room and slid into the chair opposite her. He didn’t say hello. He just leaned forward, his forearms on the table, his gaze pinning her in place.
“What did he do?”
She told him. The words came out in a torrent. The deleted file. The 7:15 a.m. timestamp. The deadline. Cole’s feigned shock, his patronizing offers of help. The way he was already on his way to “fix” the problem he’d created.
“He’s erasing my work,” she finished, her voice breaking. “He’s erasing me.”
Kian listened, his expression hardening into granite. The muscle in his jaw worked, a silent testament to the rage building inside him. When she was done, he was quiet for a long moment.
“The proposal,” he said, his voice a low growl. “Can you rewrite it?”
“Not by five p.m.,” she said, shaking her head. “The research alone took weeks. Sourcing the primary documents, cross-referencing shipping manifests… I’d need a miracle.”
He looked at her, his eyes intense. “What’s the topic?”
“It’s for an exhibit on 18th-century maritime trade,” she said, the familiar words feeling hollow. “My thesis is that a specific consortium of Dutch merchants used forged manifests to circumvent British tariffs, effectively creating a shadow economy that funded…”
“The West Indies smuggling routes,” he finished for her.
Audrey stared at him. “How did you…?”
“The Dehua porcelain you were worried about,” he said, ignoring her question. “Was it part of the Van der Meer collection?”
Her jaw went slack. “Yes. The centerpiece. How do you know that?”
“Van der Meer didn’t trade with the British. He exclusively used Portuguese shipping lines running out of Macau, bypassing the usual channels,” Kian said, his tone matter-of-fact, as if discussing the weather. “His manifests wouldn’t be in the British East India Company archives. You’d need to check the Lisbon Maritime Archives. Specifically, the records for the Serpente do Mar.”
She felt a dizzying sense of vertigo. He was talking about research so obscure it had taken her two months of doctoral work to uncover. He was a dockworker. A logistics consultant. How could he possibly know this?
“My family was in the business,” he said, a vague, dismissive explanation. “It’s a hobby. Now, what else did you have?”
Before she could process, he was in motion. He stood, pulling a pen from his pocket. He grabbed a stack of napkins from the dispenser on the table.
“Give me the bullet points. The main arguments. The key artifacts.”
He wasn’t offering sympathy. He was offering a strategy. He was building a lifeboat.
For the next hour, the cafe faded away. There was only the small table, the growing pile of ink-covered napkins, and Kian’s focused intensity. She talked, and he listened, occasionally stopping her to ask a question so insightful, so specific, it left her breathless.
He knew which ports silted up in the 1780s, which families controlled the insurance syndicates, which trade winds were most reliable in the autumn of 1783. He seemed to hold a complete map of that forgotten world in his head.
Her passion, so recently crushed, reignited. She wasn’t a victim here. She was an expert, and he was treating her like one. He wasn’t saving her; he was collaborating with her. The intellectual connection was a jolt, as powerful and intoxicating as his kiss in the alley.
“Okay,” he said finally, looking down at the twenty-odd napkins covered in their scribbled notes. “We have the skeleton. Now we need to put the meat on the bones. Where’s the best library for this?”
“The museum’s research annex is the best, but I can’t go back there. Cole will be…”
“No. Not there. Somewhere he won’t look. Somewhere public.”
“The Public Library has a decent historical collection, but we’d never get it done in time.”
Kian’s phone buzzed. He glanced at it, his expression unreadable, and typed a quick reply.
“Change of plans,” he said, standing up. “We’re not going to the library.” He gathered the napkins, stacking them neatly. “Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“To my office.”
His “office” turned out to be a vast, cavernous warehouse loft in the shipyard district. The kind of place with exposed brick, massive industrial windows, and ceilings so high they got lost in the shadows. It was mostly empty, except for a huge oak table in the center of the room, surrounded by half a dozen chairs. A powerful laptop sat on the table, humming quietly.
“This is your office?” she asked, stunned.
“Sometimes.” He gestured to the table. “Sit.”
He opened his laptop. For the next three hours, they worked. He typed with a speed and efficiency that was mesmerizing, his big hands flying across the keyboard. He translated her frantic notes into clean, persuasive prose. When they hit a snag, a detail she couldn’t recall, he would go quiet for a moment, then his fingers would fly again.
He pulled up digitized maps she’d never seen, accessed private databases she didn’t know existed, and cited sources from collections in Amsterdam and Hong Kong.
“How are you doing this?” she asked, watching in awe as he cross-referenced a shipping schedule from a 1781 logbook.
“I have a good internet connection,” he said without looking up.
The lie was so blatant, so absurd, it should have been insulting. But it wasn’t. It was a shield, and she understood he was putting it up for a reason. There was a story here, a secret he was keeping. But right now, she didn’t care. All that mattered was the words appearing on the screen.
Her proposal was coming back to life. It wasn’t just a copy. It was better. Stronger. Sharpened by his knowledge, focused by his questions.
At 4:45 p.m., he hit print.
A sleek, modern printer in the corner whirred to life, spitting out ten perfect pages. He collated them, stapled them, and slid the finished document into a crisp manila envelope he produced from a drawer.
He handed it to her.
She took it, her fingers brushing his. The paper was still warm. She looked from the envelope in her hands to his face. His expression was calm, his eyes steady on hers.
He hadn’t just helped her rewrite a grant. He had taken the pieces of her that Cole had tried to shatter and helped her put them back together. Stronger than before.
Her phone buzzed violently in her bag. A dozen texts and missed calls from Cole, each more frantic than the last. Where are you? The IT department has no idea where you are. Audrey, call me right now. I’m worried sick.
She ignored it. It was just noise from a world that no longer felt real.
“I don’t know how to thank you,” she said, her voice thick with emotion.
“Get the grant,” he said simply. “That’s the thanks.”
She looked at him, at this impossible, mysterious man who knew the secrets of 18th-century trade and kissed like he was drowning. He was an enigma wrapped in a puzzle, but one thing was becoming terrifyingly clear.
She wasn’t just attracted to him. She wasn’t just grateful to him.
She was starting to see him. The man himself. His quiet strength. His sharp mind. The fierce protectiveness in his eyes.
And the realization hit her with the force of a physical blow.
She was in so much more trouble than she’d ever been with Cole. Because this feeling wasn’t about being trapped.
It was about wanting to be found.