In which Lina discovers what freedom costs — and pays without hesitating.
She woke before the city did.
The apartment hotel room was grey in the pre-dawn, the curtains doing almost nothing to hold back the early light seeping in from the street below. Lina lay still for a moment, listening to the sounds she would have to learn: the distant percussion of a garbage truck, a dog somewhere three floors up, the hiss of a bus pulling away from the stop on the corner.
None of it sounded like the Cole estate. That was the point.
She sat up slowly and looked at her hands in her lap. The diamond caught even this thin light and threw it back at her — five carats, princess cut, the ring Lucien had placed on her finger at their engagement dinner without ever asking what style she might prefer. It had always been slightly too loose. She had never had it resized because she had been afraid to ask for anything that might remind him she was a person with preferences.
