My Rival Co-CEOS

Chapter 22

Guilt doesn't arrive all at once. It seeps — through the sheets, through the thin grey light pressing against the curtains, through the muscle-deep ache that lives in my hips and my ribs and the places where Julian's hands gripped hard.

I made it back to the guest room at three in the morning. The hallway had been empty, the estate wrapped in its disciplined silence, every footstep either gone or imagined.

I'd closed the door behind me and stood in the dark with my back against it, breathing like a woman who'd just outrun a fire she started herself.

The guilt that arrives with the daylight isn't the clean, simple kind that follows wrongdoing. It's the tangled kind — knotted at every junction, pulling in directions that contradict each other.

Guilt for wanting Julian. Guilt for still wanting Theo. Guilt for lying to both of them about different things, in different rooms, wearing different versions of a woman I'm no longer certain I recognize.

I shower until the water runs cold. I dress in yesterday's linen pants and a fresh blouse from my bag, and I brush my hair into submission, and I look at the woman in the bathroom mirror and dare her to hold my gaze.

She does. She looks exhausted and terrified and more alive than she has in months, and the aliveness is the part I can't forgive.

The kitchen is sunlit and quiet. Theo stands at the counter beside the French press, sleeves rolled, hair still damp, scrolling his phone with the focused calm of a man whose night contained spreadsheets instead of fireplaces.

He looks up when I enter, and his smile is genuine — warm, unguarded, the version of Theo that surfaces when the performance hasn't started yet and the morning is still soft enough to be honest in.

"There you are." He sets his phone down and pushes a cup toward me. "I made coffee. Cream, no sugar."

The correction stops me mid-stride.

Cream. No sugar. The right way. My way — the way I've been drinking it in silent, bitter resignation for weeks because telling him felt like admitting I wasn't worth knowing.

He noticed. He learned. He remembered.

And the timing of this small, devastating kindness — this proof that he is capable of paying attention, that the machinery of care exists inside him and merely required a longer ignition sequence than most — lands in the center of my chest like a fist wrapped in velvet.

"You changed it," I say, and my voice catches on the last syllable before I can smooth it.

"You told me I never asked how you take yours."

He leans against the counter, watching me with the quiet attention I begged for on a terrace, in a garden, across a dozen dinners where his gaze always drifted somewhere I couldn't follow.

"So I asked the kitchen staff instead. Apparently you've been very specific with them since your first weekend here."

My fingers wrap around the cup. The coffee is warm and right, and the rightness makes my eyes sting because he is trying, and I spent last night on a library rug with his brother's mouth against my throat, and the distance between what I deserve and what I've done has never felt wider than this kitchen.

I set the cup down and cross the room before my pride can intervene. My arms wrap around his waist. My face presses against his chest, and I hold on with a desperation that has nothing to do with love and everything to do with the need to anchor myself to the version of my life I chose before last night rearranged the architecture.

He's surprised. I feel it in the half-second delay before his arms close around me, the slight stiffness in his shoulders that softens as his body catches up to the gesture.

His chin rests on the top of my head, and his hand settles against my back with a pressure that feels like shelter.

"I missed you last night," he says, his voice low and close against my hair. "The calls ran late. Singapore wouldn't settle, and by the time Calloway signed off it was past two. I should have come to find you."

The sentence presses against the bruise Julian left on my conscience, and the pain is so precise I have to lock my jaw to keep the sound inside.

You should have. You should have come looking for me, and you would have found the library empty and the fire burned to embers and the rug still warm from two bodies that had no business being tangled together on your grandfather's floor.

I press my face harder against his shirt and breathe him in — clean linen, cedar soap, the familiar scent of a man I have loved for six years — and I hold on because letting go would mean looking at his face, and looking at his face would mean he'd see mine, and mine is carrying a confession that would end everything.

Footsteps sound against the marble behind me.

I don't pull away from Theo. I stay exactly where I am — face against his chest, arms locked around his waist — and I feel rather than see Julian enter the kitchen.

The silence shifts. The air takes on a weight that has nothing to do with weather and everything to do with the particular density of a room containing two brothers and a woman who kissed both of them in the same house within the span of a week.

I turn my head just enough to see him.

Julian stands by the doorway, taking in the scene with an expression so carefully, expertly blank that the effort behind it is more visible than any emotion could be.

His jaw tightens — a single, involuntary contraction along the left side where the tension line lives — and his hands curl into fists at his sides, knuckles whitening around nothing, gripping air because gripping anything else would betray the control he's spending everything to maintain.

His gaze meets mine for one quarter of a second. Long enough to deliver, short enough to deny.

He crosses to the coffee station. Pours a cup with steady hands that contradict every rigid line in his body. He doesn't speak. He doesn't look at us again. He takes his coffee through the glass doors onto the terrace, and the click of the latch behind him sounds like a sentence finished without punctuation.

The morning arranges itself around us the way mornings in this house always do — with the choreographed precision of people who have agreed to perform normalcy until normalcy becomes true.

Theo keeps my hand through breakfast. Julian sits at the far end of the terrace and reads his phone. Camille watches everything from behind her espresso, her dark eyes moving between the three of us with the quiet intelligence of a woman who has assembled a puzzle no one handed her the box for.

She says nothing. She doesn't need to. Her gaze catches mine once across the table, and the recognition in it — not judgment, not accusation, just the clear-eyed awareness of a woman who understands the particular mathematics of loving men who share a face — makes my ribs contract around a shame I can't exhale.

After brunch, the corridor stretches long and quiet toward the guest wing. My bare feet are silent on the cool marble, and I am counting the doors between me and a room where I can close the world out and sit with the wreckage I've made of my own decisions.

Julian steps out from a side hallway and blocks my path.

He stands close enough that I can see the amber flecks in his eyes, the scar above his left temple, every detail I cataloged in firelight now rendered in the harsh, unforgiving clarity of midday. His voice is low, controlled, stripped of every playful note I've ever heard from him.

"If you go back to him after last night, at least have the decency to tell me to my face." His jaw works once, twice, holding back a volume his words refuse to carry. "Don't make me watch you pretend it didn't happen. Don't stand in his arms in that kitchen and look at me like I'm the one who should feel guilty for wanting you."

His eyes hold mine. Beneath the control, beneath the careful blankness he wore like armor all morning, I see the hurt — real, unperformed, unprotected. The wound of a man who knelt on a rug and asked someone to choose him and is watching her choose someone else in real time.

I open my mouth. The words gather — an explanation, an apology, a truth I haven't finished assembling — and Julian shakes his head once.

Not here. Not now.