Summer arrived in New York like a fist wrapped in wet velvet: humid, merciless, and impossible to ignore.
Victoria barely noticed the heat anymore.
She noticed everything else.
She noticed the way Elias's gray T-shirt turned dark across the shoulders when he lifted fifty-pound bags of dog food like they were pillows.
She noticed the faint white scar that cut through his left ribs when he peeled off his shirt in the shelter's back room to change into something dry (shrapnel, he had told her once, quiet, like it was a grocery list item).
She noticed the exact moment he started noticing her back.
They had fallen into a rhythm that terrified her with its ordinariness.
Tuesdays and Thursdays: volunteer nights at the shelter.
Saturday mornings: he fixed things for people who couldn't pay—Mrs. Alvarez's radiator on the fourth-floor walk-up in Washington Heights, the bodega owner's ancient freezer in Bed-Stuy, the church basement in Bushwick that flooded every time it rained.
Sunday afternoons: they walked the dogs together along the East River Greenway, Luna the three-legged pit bull trotting between them like a chaperone.
She had not tried to buy him in ninety-four days.
She kept count the way recovering addicts counted sober days.
She told herself it was strategy—let him lower his guard, let him think she had accepted his boundaries.
The truth was uglier: she was terrified that if she reached for her usual weapons (money, power, control), he would vanish again, and this time she might not survive it.
June bled into July.
The city shimmered in heat mirages, sidewalks radiating warmth like bread ovens. The shelter's ancient AC wheezed and died on the hottest day of the year—102 °F with 89 % humidity.
They spent six hours moving dogs into the one room with a window unit that still worked, carrying water bowls, soaking towels in ice, taking turns lying on the concrete floor with the old-timers who panted like bellows.
At 9 p.m. the power finally came back on. The volunteers cheered like they'd won the lottery.
Victoria was on her knees in front of a senior beagle named Pickles, trying to coax him into drinking from a bowl she held with shaking hands. Her hair had escaped its ponytail hours ago and clung to her neck in damp curls. Her formerly white tank top was now tie-dyed with dog slobber and bleach. She smelled like wet fur and desperation.
Elias crouched beside her, forearms streaked with dirt, eyes soft.
"You okay?"
She tried to answer and found her throat too dry.
He took the bowl from her trembling fingers, set it down, and cupped the back of her neck with one cool, wet hand.
"Breathe, Vic."
It was the first time he had ever shortened her name.
Something inside her cracked open like an egg.
She leaned forward until her forehead rested against his collarbone. He smelled like hard work and Gatorade and safety. His other arm came around her automatically, pulling her in.
Around them, dogs panted, volunteers bustled, the AC rattled back to life.
Neither of them moved.
Later—minutes or hours, she wasn't sure—he helped her to her feet. The shelter director pressed cold bottles of water into their hands and told them to go home.
They walked out into the night together.
The air outside was still thick, but a breeze had kicked up off the water, carrying the smell of the river and distant rain. Luna trotted ahead on her three legs, tail wagging like nothing had ever tried to break her.
They walked in silence for three blocks before Elias spoke.
"You didn't have to stay today."
"I know."
"You could've been in the Hamptons. Or Saint-Tropez. Or literally anywhere with air-conditioning that works."
"I know."
He stopped under a streetlamp that painted them both in bruised orange light.
"Then why?"
She looked at him—at the sweat drying on his temples, at the worry line between his brows that hadn't been there six months ago, at the crescent moon on his hand that had started all of this—and answered with the only truth she had left.
"Because you were here."
The words hung between them, naked and irreversible.
His eyes searched her face for the lie and didn't find it.
Something shifted in his expression—surprise, recognition, maybe the first real crack in the wall he had built the night he dragged her from wreckage and walked away.
He reached out slowly, like she was a spooked animal, and tucked a damp curl behind her ear.
"Come on," he said, voice rough. "I'll buy you a taco."
They ended up at a truck in Red Hook that stayed open until 2 a.m., plastic stools under a blue tarp, salsa music crackling from a blown speaker. The carnitas were perfect—crisp edges, melting fat, lime squeezed over the top like absolution.
Victoria ate three and didn't care that grease ran down her wrist.
Elias watched her with something that looked dangerously like wonder.
"What?" she asked, mouth full.
"Nothing," he said, but he was smiling. "Just never seen you eat like a human before."
She kicked him lightly under the table.
They watched cargo ships drift down the harbor, lights blinking slow and red across black water. The breeze off the river cooled the sweat on their skin.
At some point his hand found hers on the tabletop. Calloused thumb tracing the ridge of her knuckles like he was reading braille.
She let him.
When the truck closed, they walked back toward where she had parked the Maybach—three blocks away, because even now she couldn't quite bring herself to leave it on the street in Red Hook.
Halfway there, the sky opened.
Not a polite summer shower. A deluge. Biblical.
They were soaked in seconds.
Victoria laughed—startled, breathless, the sound foreign in her own throat.
Elias looked at her like she had grown a second head.
"What?" she gasped, wiping rain from her eyes.
"You're laughing," he said. "In public. While ruined."
She laughed harder.
He grabbed her hand and pulled her under the awning of a closed bodega. The rain drummed on the metal roof like a thousand tiny hammers.
They were both dripping, shivering, alive.
He pushed her back against the roll-down gate, hands on either side of her head, caging her without touching.
"Victoria," he said, and her name in his mouth sounded like a prayer and a warning at the same time.
She tilted her face up.
He kissed her.
Not soft.
Not careful.
A kiss that tasted like summer rain and carnitas and every rule she had ever made for herself shattering at once.
His hands slid into her wet hair, tilting her head back. She clutched fistfuls of his soaked T-shirt and kissed him back like a woman who had forgotten how to breathe and suddenly remembered.
When they broke apart, foreheads still touching, rain still pouring, he rested his right hand—the one with the crescent moon—against her jaw.
"I'm not for sale," he whispered against her lips.
"I know," she whispered back.
"Good."
Then he kissed her again, slower this time, deeper, until the rain stopped mattering and the city disappeared.
Later, in the Maybach with the privacy partition up and the heat blasting, she laid her head on his shoulder and watched the windshield wipers beat a rhythm that sounded suspiciously like a heartbeat.
She was still terrified.
But for the first time in her life, the terror felt like the beginning of something instead of the end.