Chapter 131: Gut feeling

Jesus Christ.

Hair wrecked. Lips swollen. Eyes glassy. Shirt splattered with cum. Face flushed so red I looked sunburned.

I splashed water on my face.

It didn’t help.

I straightened my jacket as best I could.

Tugged the lapels forward to hide the worst of the mess.

Took a deep breath.

I splashed my face again and again, the icy water a shock to my system. I looked at myself in the mirror. I was beyond ashamed but my eyes were wide and dark with a hunger I couldn’t admit to.

“He’s just a person,” I told my reflection.

“He’s just Cassian. You’re fine.”

But the mirror lied. I wasn’t fine. I was a disaster.

I couldn’t go back in there yet. The air in the ballroom was too thick with him. I needed space.

I began to wander the corridors of the Llotja de Mar, letting the grand, silent architecture calm my nerves. The marble columns and intricate crown moldings gave me something objective to focus on.

I rounded a corner near a service hallway, and my breath hitched, not from arousal this time, but from confusion.

A figure was moving quickly down the hall, flanked by two massive men in dark suits. They were built like walls, their movements coordinated and grim.

In the center of them was the woman from the construction site. The reporter. The one who had ambushed Alex with questions about lawsuits and safety violations.

She wasn’t being dragged, but the way the men hemmed her in made it clear she didn’t have a choice. She looked pale, her lips pressed into a thin line of compliance.

Something felt wrong. This wasn’t a press interview. This was an extraction.

I followed them at a distance, my curiosity overriding my common sense. They turned a corner toward a restricted wing of the building. But before I could reach the turn, a hand clamped onto my shoulder.

“Sir. This area is restricted,” a security guard said. His voice was flat, his eyes hidden behind dark lenses even indoors.

“I was just… looking for the garden,” I lied, my heart starting to pound for a very different reason.

“Please return to the event,” he said. It wasn’t a suggestion.

I looked past him, but the reporter and her escort were already gone. “Right. Sorry.”

By the time I slipped back into my seat, Cassian was already off the stage, sitting at his table with a glass of scotch in his hand.

Alex was at the podium now, beginning his speech.

I tried to focus on him, but my mind was stuck on that woman in the hallway.

Alex was the polar opposite of Cassian on stage. Where Cassian was cold and commanding, Alex was warm and charismatic. He smiled at the audience like they were all old friends.

“I believe in building more than structures,” Alex said, his voice honey-smooth.

“I believe in building communities. Creating spaces where people thrive.”

The audience ate it up. They laughed at his jokes and nodded at his talk of “innovation and care.”

“Because at the end of the day,” Alex continued, “what we build isn’t just about profit. It’s about legacy. It’s about making a difference.”

He sounded so sincere. So benevolent. It was everything Cassian’s speech wasn’t.

And yet, I couldn’t stop thinking about the men who had been escorting that reporter.

When Alex finished, the applause was thunderous and genuine. He stepped off the stage, but instead of returning to the table, he was intercepted by two men.

My stomach dropped. I recognized one of them. He was one of the men who had been with the reporter.

They whispered something to Alex. For a split second, his mask slipped. A smirk, cold and satisfied, crossed his face before he smoothed it back into a polite smile.

He nodded and began to follow them toward the same corridor where I had been stopped.

He caught me watching.

He didn’t look guilty. He simply winked at me, a casual, reassuring gesture, and then pulled out his phone.

A second later, my phone buzzed on the table.

Sorry, need to handle something. Don’t worry. Back soon.

The text was meant to be comforting, but it felt like a dismissal. I watched his back disappear into the shadows of the hallway, a sense of deep, gnawing unease settling in my gut.

Twenty minutes passed. I picked at my dinner, the expensive sea bass tasting like ash in my mouth. Then, as if he had never left, Alex reappeared. He slid into his seat, unruffled and smiling.

“Sorry about that,” he said, patting my hand.

“Business never sleeps, even at a gala.”

“Everything okay?” I asked, searching his face for any sign of what had happened in that hallway.

“Of course,” he said, his eyes bright.

“Nothing to worry about, Noah.”

But I was worried. I was suspicious. And I felt a wave of guilt for even thinking it, Alex had been nothing but kind to me. Why was I suddenly looking at him like he was a villain?

The dinner service continued, the atmosphere in the room relaxing into a comfortable hum of networking. But I was stuck in a loop. The reporter, the security,

Alex’s smirk, the way Cassian’s speech had felt like a warning.

The pieces were there, but I couldn’t fit them together.

I looked across the room. Cassian was staring at me. He wasn’t hiding it anymore.

His gaze was heavy, burning with an intensity that made the fine hairs on my arms stand up. He looked like he knew exactly what I was thinking. Or maybe he just knew exactly how he had made me feel earlier.

I didn’t look away this time. I couldn’t. Even as the memories of my “act” in the bathroom rushed back in humiliating waves, crashing over me.

There was something dark lurking at the edges of this beautiful evening. Between the two men at the center of my life, one was a wolf who didn’t hide his teeth, and the other… I was starting to realize I didn’t know what the other one was at all.

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