Chapter 4

Chapter 4 DENISE The bag cost forty-two thousand dollars. I stood at the counter of the luxury boutique on the third floor of Elara Grand Mall, watching as the sales girl wrapped the bag gently with tissue paper, with a kind of reverence that had been reserved for holy objects. The bag was a deep red tote, with soft leather and golden handwritten prints embedded in it. I’d walked the entire floor twice searching for a bag that would catch my fancy before settling on it. The money Dante sent wasn’t love. It wasn’t even guilt that his sister was still harassing me, but he didn’t want to step in, because stepping in would look like he cared about me, and he needed not to care about me so that Elena could choose him. So basically this money was just management—the same way you’d oil a hinge to stop it from squeaking. But forty-two thousand dollars was still forty-two thousand dollars, and I was practical enough to use it. The sales associate smiled at me with the kind of warmth that only appeared when a transaction of this size was on the table. i had noticed that the sales people in this kinfd of building only treated you as what you had in your pockets, “Wonderful choice. This one just came in. Very limited.” I nodded and handed over the card to her so that she can run the bill, before she can hand over the purchased item to me. It went through without a hiccup. Of course it did. Dante’s supplementary card had no spending limit that I’d ever managed to hit. She handed me the receipt in a small cream envelope and the bag in a ribbon-tied box, and I carried it out into the corridor of the mall, already running the math in my head. Resale value on this piece was strong—this particular style had a waitlist, which meant secondary market buyers would pay a premium. I could post it tonight. Discreetly. Through a resale account I’d set up two years ago under a different name, separate from anything Dante could trace back to me. He checked my accounts occasionally. Not because he was controlling—or maybe he was, and I’d normalized it so thoroughly I no longer recognized it for what it was—but because he liked to know where I was spending his money, what i got with it. he liked to feel like the money he gave to me in this account was being used by me, like it mattered to me. Well it did matter to me, but not in the way that he expected. I was almost at the escalator when i saw it. A small crowd had gathered around a display near the entrance of the boutique I’d just left. Not a crowd exactly, they were maybe 4 or 5 people who was cearly window shopping, more interested in looking than buying when i saw tge bag that was behind the showcase. My eyes widened as i immediately recognized the bag, this was the bag that Elena was holding while with Dante while i was alone in a hospital with broken ribs. Because Dante had his prorities straight and wasn’t going to let an obstacle like me ruin his time with elena. I walked over, more out of compulsion than curiosity. The sales associate behind the case was different from the one who’d helped me—younger, with the careful posture of someone newly trained. She smiled when I approached. “Interested in the Céleste? It’s our most exclusive current piece.” “How much?” “The starting reservation price is thirty million dollars.” The number entered my ears and took a moment to travel to my brain. Thirty million. Not thirty thousand. Not three hundred thousand. Thirty million dollars, as a starting price, just to reserve the right to be considered for purchase. Which meant that the bag cost significantly higher than this, if reserving a slot was thirty million dollars. I kept my face still, neutral, just like i have always done, due to years being perfected on it. “It’s one of twelve in existence,” the associate continued explaining it to me, like she wanted me to know the value of it. ” One of our top buyers, Alpha Blackwood placed the reservation three months ago. We delivered last week.” Three months ago. Three months ago, Dante and I were still—I stopped that thought where it stood. Three months ago, he was reserving a thirty-million-dollar bag for Elena, his priorities straight even before she came back . While I was at his apartment on Thursday nights, taking the pills that made me nauseous for three days afterward because he didn’t like using anything else. While I was scheduling his meetings and fetching her coffee and pretending I had no idea where his hands had been the night before. The math wasn’t complicated. Fifty thousand dollars to keep me quiet, keep me manageable, keep me from making a scene. Thirty million to make Elena smile. One was a silencer. The other was a declaration. I’d always understood on some level that I was not Elena. I wasn’t from an Alpha bloodline. I wasn’t anyone’s childhood sweetheart. I was an omega orphan who’d caught his eye at the worst moment of her life, and he’d kept me because it was convenient and he needed stress relief. The number difference between me and Elena didn’t devastate me the way it might have a week ago. What it did was clarify. It stripped away the last of the fuzzy, protected middle ground I’d been living in—the place where I could almost convince myself that what Dante and I had was complicated rather than the basic simplicity of it. It wasn’t complicated. It was always very simple. He loved Elena. He used me. The price tags just confirmed the math. “Thank you,” I told the associate, and walked away.