Isabella's POV
The penthouse takes up the entire eighty-seventh floor of Whitmore Tower. I've never been this high up. In more ways than one.
The elevator opens directly into the entrance hall, and I step out and stop, because the view hits before anything else does — floor-to-ceiling glass on three sides, the entire city spread out below like someone tipped a jewelry box and never cleaned it up. Every light, every bridge, every block of dark river between the buildings. I put one hand flat against the glass without thinking, steadying myself against something that doesn't need steadying. The glass is cold. The city doesn't care.
I stand there for longer than I mean to.
"Your room is this way," Alexander says, moving past me without stopping, his jacket already off and carried loose at his side, like a man in his own body in a way I've rarely seen anyone be.
I follow him through a living room that I don't have the vocabulary for — not large but enormous, not decorated but curated — past a painting I'm almost certain I've seen in a museum, past furniture that looks like it was made for exactly this room by someone who measured it first. I trail my fingers along the back of a chair without meaning to and then pull my hand back. Everything is precise and considered and I can feel, in a way I can't quite name, that this is a space belonging to a man who knows exactly who he is.
My room is at the end of a wide corridor, and it is nothing like I expected.
It's not a guest room. Whoever prepared it was thinking about someone specific — the bookshelves are full, the desk is positioned toward the window so whoever sits there will face the sky, and the walk-in closet, when Alexander opens the door and steps back so I can see it, one hand on the frame, is already stocked. Every piece from Saks, organized by color and weight, alongside other things I don't yet recognize.
"There are more being delivered tomorrow," he says. "Clara handles the details."
I look at the closet for a long moment. Then at him. He's watching me with that particular quality of attention he has, like he's already noted my reaction and filed it somewhere. "This wasn't put together in two days."
A pause. "No," he says.
I don't ask how long. I'm not sure I'm ready for that answer. I close the closet door myself, gently.
He shows me the ensuite — marble, a freestanding bath, products arranged on the shelf that I recognize as expensive and some I recognize as mine, the exact brands I used in an apartment I no longer have access to — and then he stops in the doorway with the particular efficiency of a man wrapping up a meeting. Shoulders squared, weight settled, hands loose. A man who is done with one thing and ready to begin the next.
"The rules," he says. "Separate bedrooms. My room is across the hall. Public appearances as a couple — warmth, contact, the story we're selling. One year minimum, unless the inheritance terms require extension." He meets my eyes, holds them. "My door is always open. That's a practical matter, not an invitation."
"Understood," I say.
"Staff: Miriam handles the house, David is chef, and you've already met Clara. Anything you need, you ask. No limit, no accounting." He moves back toward the corridor. "Get some sleep. We have three days."
"Alexander." He stops. He turns back, unhurried, and waits with the patience of someone accustomed to being the last word in any room. "Thank you," I say. "For all of this."
He looks at me for a moment with that unreadable steadiness of his — not cold, exactly, but contained. Like something carefully kept. Then he nods, once, and he's gone, and I'm alone in a room that already knows my sizes and my favorite shampoo, and the city glitters eighty-seven floors below like it's showing off.
*****
I can't sleep.
I try — I lie in the bed, which is the most comfortable thing I've ever been horizontal on, and I watch the ceiling and I try. But my brain won't stop running the last four days in a loop, and somewhere around three in the morning I give up, push the covers back, and go looking for water.
The living room is mostly dark, just the city light coming through the glass walls, painting everything in faint silver and amber, and I don't see him until I'm already halfway across the room.
Alexander is on the couch with his laptop open, shirtless in sweatpants, forearms braced on his knees and his whole posture arranged around the screen with that same focused economy he brings to everything. He looks up when I stop moving — unhurried, unsurprised, the way he looks at everything, like nothing arrives without him having already accounted for the possibility.
"Can't sleep?" he says.
I shake my head.
I get my water and come back and sit in the armchair nearest the window, because going back to my room feels wrong and staying in the kitchen alone feels worse. I draw my feet up under me. He returns to his screen. The city breathes below us. It's almost comfortable in a strange, specific way — two people who don't fully know each other yet, occupying the same quiet without needing to fill it.
I watched him for a while. The focused set of his jaw. The way his hand moves across the trackpad in deliberate small arcs, pausing, deciding, moving on. There's something restful about watching a person who is entirely themselves.
"Why are you really doing this?" I say.
He doesn't look up right away. "The contract…"
"Don't tell me it's just the contract," I say.
He closes the laptop slowly, both hands moving to the cover like he's closing a book he intends to return to. He turns to look at me, and in the dark with only the city light behind him he looks different than he does in here and in front of cameras — the discipline still there but worn looser.
"Seventeen years ago," he says, "a little girl cried like her world had ended. I gave her my handkerchief and I made myself a promise." He holds my gaze without blinking, without softening it. "I keep my promises."
The room is very quiet.
I don't know what to say to that. I don't think there is a right thing, so I don't try. I look at the city instead, all that light suspended in the dark, and I hold my water glass in both hands and feel the cold of it.
He opens his laptop again. "Go to bed, Isabella. We have a wedding to plan and three days isn't much time."
I blink. "Three days?"
"Saturday." He says it the way he says most things — like it's already decided and he's simply informing me of a fact. His eyes stay on the screen, but the corner of his mouth moves, just slightly. "Did I forget to mention?"
"We're getting married on Saturday," I say flatly.
He looks up, and there it is — that expression that is not quite a smile but lives in the same neighborhood and is considerably more dangerous. The kind of expression that suggests he has been waiting, with some patience, for me to catch up. "Welcome to my world, Isabella," he says. "Try to keep up."
I go back to bed. I don't sleep any better, but for entirely different reasons.