The champagne glass is halfway to her lips when he says it.
“Your boyfriend is upstairs with my wife, Ivy.”
Ivy Madison doesn’t drop the glass. She has been trained by life—by Atlanta Sunday mornings and gallery openings, by years of being the only Black woman in rooms full of people waiting for her to crack, to finally drop something. But her hand stops.
Her whole body stops. She turns slowly toward the voice because something in it tells her not to rush.
This voice doesn’t need rushing toward. It is deep and even and terrifyingly calm, like a man who has said worse things in quieter tones and lived through all of them.
The man standing beside her is Korean, tall, built like architecture—deliberate, exact, nothing wasted.
His suit is charcoal and almost certainly costs more than her rent. His jaw is the kind you study when you’re learning to draw things that don’t forgive mistakes. His eyes are dark and completely level and doing something complicated.
He is not gloating.
That is what breaks her open. He looks like a man receiving confirmation of something devastating that he already knew.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Third floor,” he replies, calm as stone. “The private suite.
I had the building surveilled six months ago when I began to suspect. Tonight confirmed it.”
He checks his watch in one smooth motion, precise as a full stop.
“They’ve been up there for fifty-three minutes.”
Ivy sets her champagne down. The rooftop party swirls around them—crystal and candlelight, a string quartet playing something that was probably romantic an hour ago.
Seoul burns gold and electric through the glass panels of the terrace.
She is wearing a wine-red dress she saved for. Her locs are pinned with the gold cuffs her mother sent from Atlanta. She came tonight on the arm of Nathan Webb, her boyfriend of fourteen months, because Nathan said this gala would open doors for her career.
Open doors for her career.
“How do you know who I am?” she asks, because that question she can handle.
The other one—Nathan, fifty-three minutes, third floor—she’ll handle in a minute or a year or never.
“You’re with Nathan Webb. I know Nathan Webb.” His voice sharpens just slightly, like a blade turned one degree. “My name is Jeffrey Park.
This building is mine. This event is mine.”
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