Chapter 1064
Victoria turned and walked out, leaving Skye alone with the hum of the ventilation.
Skye looked in the mirror. She looked pale. His love is heavy. She straightened her spine. She could carry it. She had to.
She walked back to the dining room. Alistair was cutting a piece of Wagyu beef, his movements precise and surgical. He didn’t look up as she entered, but he stopped cutting.
He speared a piece of meat and held it out toward her as she sat down. “Open.”
Skye looked at him. His eyes were soft, crinkled at the corners. It wasn’t a mask. It was him—the part of him that existed only for her.
She opened her mouth. He fed her.
“Is it good?” he asked.
“It is perfect,” Skye said.
Alistair immediately relaxed. The tension in his shoulders dropped an inch. He pressed the back of his hand gently against her forehead. His skin was warm and dry.
“You look pale,” he said. “Are you tired?”
“Just a long day,” Skye admitted.
He stood up, tossing his napkin onto the table. “We are leaving.”
“But we haven’t had dessert,” Gabriel protested, his mouth full of bread.
“The bill is settled. Go home,” Alistair ordered.
He pulled Skye’s chair out, then wrapped her coat around her shoulders, his hands lingering a second too long at her neck, his thumbs tracing the pulse point there.
In the car, the silence was heavy. City lights blurred past the tinted windows. Alistair held her hand in his lap, his thumb rubbing slow circles on her knuckles. Same pressure. Same speed. Over and over.
“Alistair,” Skye asked, staring out the window. “Why did you really spare Dominic?”
“Because you commanded it,” he answered instantly. No hesitation.
“What if I had been wrong?”
Alistair turned to look at her, the streetlights casting shifting shadows across his face.
“Then I would have killed him later,” he said, his voice casual, as if discussing the weather. “And I would have cleaned up the mess so you never had to see it.”
He squeezed her hand.
“My morality is simple, Skye. There is you. And there is everything else. Everything else is negotiable.”
Skye looked at him. The logic was sound. Cold, terrifying, and sound.
Victoria was right. He wasn’t navigating by ethics. He was navigating by her.
And that scared her more than the knife ever could.
The next morning, the sky was a bruised purple, heavy with rain that refused to fall. Skye stood in the kitchen of her penthouse, brewing coffee. The silence of the apartment was oppressive.
She needed space. She needed to think without Alistair’s eyes tracking her every micro-movement, analyzing her for signs of stress.
She picked up her tablet and initiated a secure, encrypted handshake protocol—the only way to reach the ghosts.
The screen didn’t show a face. No video feed. That was too dangerous. The signal bounced through seven different servers before resolving into a static image.