Dominic's POV
The garment bag arrives Monday at seven. Tuesday at seven. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday — seven o'clock, Victoria's holding company logo stamped on the plastic like a brand on cattle. Because apparently the man who built a company from a dorm room can no longer dress himself. Apparently even my socks require executive approval.
I put on whatever her stylist selects and drive the Honda to whatever fresh circle of hell she's scheduled. Strategy sessions where I present frameworks I built and she takes credit. Investor lunches where I perform the role of reformed genius, humbled and hungry, while she sits at the head of the table radiating ownership. Panel discussions where I say the words her PR team wrote and smile when the moderator calls me "a remarkable story of reinvention."
I am not reinventing. I am being worn like a suit by a woman who already gutted the original.
Tuesday's investor presentation is in a glass tower downtown — the kind of building that exists to remind everyone inside it how much money separates them from the street below. I've been on my feet for four hours, walking potential clients through proprietary methodologies that used to have my name on them and now have hers.
"That's the third pitch today." I set down the clicker as the last investor files out. "We're done."
Victoria materializes from wherever she waits between appearances — some pocket dimension where expensive women recharge their cruelty. White blazer. White trousers. She always wears white, cosplaying as something pure while the rest of us know better.
"Two more, darling." She pats my cheek. Her fingers are cold. "The Singapore group at four and the German fund at six. They specifically requested you — something about your jaw when you're being intense. Very brooding visionary. The brand team loves it."
"I'm not a brand. I'm a person."
"Were." The correction lands with surgical precision. "Were a person with agency. Now you're intellectual property. Intellectual property doesn't complain about pitch schedules, Dominic. It performs and remembers who holds the license."
I hit my marks. I perform. I remember.
The Singapore group wants to hear about scalable leadership models. I give them thirty minutes of frameworks I spent three years developing, delivered with the enthusiasm of a hostage reading a ransom note. Victoria watches from the back of the room, and the satisfaction coming off her fills the glass walls like a gas leak.
This is what she wanted. Not the revenue, not the brand equity. Me, hollowed out. Me, compliant. Me, finally understanding that every door I opened to escape led back to the same room.
The Honda's headlights find the driveway at nine-thirty. Hartwell House is dark except for the kitchen — one square of warm light in the old stone face like a lantern left burning by someone who's not sure you're coming home.
Mira sits at the table. Red pen. Cold coffee. A stack of undergraduate essays she's marking with the methodical fury of a woman who has channeled every feeling she can't express into correcting other people's footnotes. She looks up when I walk in, and her eyes do that rapid scan — face, posture, hands — reading my damage in two seconds flat.
"How was it?" Code for: how much of you is left.
"Fine." Code for: don't ask.
The shower runs until the hot water surrenders. I stand under lukewarm spray trying to wash off the hairspray and the scripted smile and the phantom pressure of Victoria's hand on my cheek like a collar disguised as affection. It doesn't work. I climb into bed next to the only person who sees me without a filter, and the ceiling stares back without answers.
Morning. Coffee that tastes like nothing. Mira across the table with her hands wrapped around her mug and that careful expression she wears when she's about to deliver information that requires structural reinforcement.
"Elliot asked about you last night." Her voice is level. Too level. "He wanted to know why you're sad. Whether he did something wrong."
My hand stops halfway to the mug. The air leaves the kitchen.
"I told him work is busy. That grown-ups get stressed." She sets her coffee down with a click that carries the weight of everything she's choosing not to say. "He didn't believe me. He said you look the same way you looked before the heating got fixed — like you're stuck somewhere cold."
My son. Who just learned to say Dad. Who just started trusting that the man at the breakfast table is permanent. Watching me disappear behind the same walls I promised I'd torn down, and doing the math that six-year-olds do — the math where everything is their fault because the world hasn't taught them yet that adults are the ones who break things.
"I should talk to him. Explain —"
"Explain what?" The level voice develops edges. "That your ex-wife owns your professional existence? That the deal you signed to save this house put a leash on you?" She pushes back from the table. "He's six, Dominic. He doesn't need corporate restructuring updates. He needs his father in the room. Actually in the room — not performing presence while his head is in some glass tower being managed by a woman who collects people like furniture."
No answer exists for that. None that doesn't make me sound like exactly the man I swore I'd stopped being.
Saturday. Victoria's team is "recalibrating the brand narrative," which I think means they're trying to figure out which organs I have left to sell. Evening off. I try — genuinely try — to be present. Chess with Elliot, except I lose track of whose turn it is twice, and he notices, because he notices everything, and the careful way he doesn't comment is worse than if he'd called me on it.
I help with dinner. Burn the garlic so comprehensively the smoke detector registers a formal protest. We order pizza instead, and my phone buzzes four times during the first slice — Victoria's assistant, Victoria's PR lead, Victoria's scheduling coordinator, Victoria's Victoria — and my jaw locks so hard my molars file grievances against each other.
Elliot is asleep by nine. The stegosaurus tucked under his chin, one hand curled around the stuffed dinosaur Dominic bought at the pharmacy during the fever. Two ridiculous sentries guarding a boy who deserves a father, not a mannequin.
Mira finds me on the couch. Sits close enough that our knees touch, which is how I know this isn't casual.
"Talk to me. About how we get you out."
"There's nothing to discuss." The laugh that comes out of me sounds like furniture collapsing. "I signed a binding agreement. I'm hers until she decides otherwise, which based on historical precedent will be approximately the heat death of the universe."
"Contracts have weaknesses."
"Not hers. She's smarter than me, Mira. Richer. Better connected. She had my own company's legal infrastructure mapped before I knew she was in the building." My hands hang between my knees. "I never beat her. Not once. Not in the marriage, not in the divorce, not in any room we've ever shared."
"You weren't fighting for anything real before." Her hands find my face — palms warm, grip fierce, ink stain on her right thumb from the red pen. Those green eyes burn at a temperature I don't have a name for. "Now you have Elliot. This house. Me. That's not nothing."
"That's exactly why I can't gamble." My voice bends in the middle. "If I fight and lose, she burns all of you. Every threat she made — Elliot's school, your career, the tabloid circus. I'd rather perform for her forever than watch her destroy what we built."
"And I refuse to watch her win." The softness leaves her face like a light switching off. Underneath — granite. The same woman who changed the wifi password to go to hell and meant it. "There's a way out. There's always a way out. If you won't find it, I will."
Something sparks behind my ribs. Not quite the thing I used to call hope — more like the space where it used to live, warming up.
"You really think we can beat her?"
"I think we don't have the option of not trying." Her thumb traces my jaw — the one Victoria's brand team calls "brooding visionary." "Together, remember?"
Together. The word settles into my bones the way heat returns to a house after the furnace kicks back on.
"Together," I say, and somewhere beneath the exhaustion — faint, stubborn, refusing to die — something starts breathing again.
She falls asleep against my chest that night, and I lie in the dark listening to her breathe and knowing, with the certainty of a man who's watched this woman fight every battle alone for six years, that she's already planning.
Victoria thinks she's won. Thinks I'm broken, managed, filed under assets.
She has never met Mira Holloway with a problem to solve and a son to protect. And that might be the first mistake she can't buy her way out of.