Chapter 12: The Broken Queen
Cambria didn’t cry. Not when the elevator doors closed behind her. Not when the lobby’s cool marble floor echoed beneath her heels. Not even when the doorman greeted her with a kind, oblivious smile that chipped at the last of her composure.
She held herself together like a fortress, her chin high, shoulders squared, breath measured until she stepped into the backseat of the black town car waiting for her outside Maddox’s building. Only then, when the city lights blurred past the tinted glass, did she allow one silent tear to fall. It carved a line down her cheek, wiped away before it could stain her.
She had kissed him. She had let herself kiss him.
And worse? A part of her still wanted more.
"Back to the Plaza, ma’am?" the driver asked, his voice calm.
"No." Her voice cracked, and she cleared it quickly. "Take me to Astoria. 41st and Broadway."
The driver hesitated. That wasn’t where someone like Cambria King normally went.
But she wasn’t that woman anymore. Not tonight.
Not since she’d kissed the man who ruined her and felt her knees almost buckle at the taste of him.
Inside a dim walk-up apartment above a closed bodega, a woman waited.
The room smelled faintly of jasmine and printer ink. Stacks of folders littered the glass coffee table. Monitors buzzed from every corner, tracking stock dips, encrypted chat logs, and a web of connections that all pointed to one man: Maddox Thorne.