Caius was halfway across the cracked pavement when he heard it — a woman’s voice, sharp and clipped, cutting through a window left open despite the evening chill.He stopped walking.It wasn’t shouting. That was the strange part. It was worse than shouting, the kind of voice that had rehearsed its own cruelty so many times it no longer needed volume.“Do you think I don’t know where you were?”He couldn’t make out Arabella’s answer. Her voice, when it came, was too low, too careful, the voice of someone choosing each word like it might cost her something.Caius’s jaw tightened. He glanced back at the taxi still idling at the curb, then at the apartment building — three floors of peeling paint and a stairwell light that flickered like it was considering giving up entirely. He climbed the steps two at a time and stopped outside a door with a number hanging by one screw.He didn’t knock. Not yet. He stood there, hand hovering an inch from the wood, and made himself listen.“I asked you a

For a few seconds, Arabella didn’t know where she was.The ceiling was wrong. The bed was too soft, too wide, the sheets smelling faintly of something clean and unfamiliar instead of the thin detergent Margaret bought in bulk. Her body tensed on instinct, the way it always did when something didn’t match what she expected — and then it came back to her in pieces. Margaret’s voice. The photograph. Caius’s hand around hers in the stairwell.She sat up slowly, pulling the blanket to her chest like she needed to justify taking up the space at all.The room was simple compared to what she imagined a place like this could be — no gold trim, no absurd chandelier — but everything in it was quietly, unmistakably expensive. The kind of expensive that didn’t need to announce itself. She ran her thumb along the edge of the blanket and felt a small stab of guilt she couldn’t fully explain.She wasn’t supposed to be somewhere like this.When she came out, Caius was already up, standing near the win