Chapter 1: Stolen Bread and Stolen Hearts
The chandeliers of La Perle dripped light like frozen tears onto the marble below. Derek Souss watched one refracted beam crawl across the immaculate white tablecloth, a slow, shining intruder he wished he could banish with a flick of his wrist. His mother’s voice, a polished blade of practiced disappointment, sawed through the clinking crystal and murmured French around them.
“A man in your position cannot afford to be seen as… incomplete, Derek.” She meticulously dissected a piece of turbot. “It invites speculation. Weakness. Charlotte von Hedwig would be perfectly suitable. Her family…”
“Her family is broke, Mother,” Derek interrupted, his voice low and smooth as the vodka in his glass. “She’s a gilded retriever. You’d be buying her for me, and we both know I don’t enjoy pre-owned things.”
His mother’s eyes, the same cold blue as his own but frostier, flashed. “Your distaste for companionship is becoming a corporate liability. Shareholders like stability. A narrative.”
A narrative. Derek almost laughed. His entire life was a narrative, written by board members and bloodline. He let his gaze drift away from her, scanning the room as if looking for an exit. That’s when he saw him.
At a recently vacated table near the kitchen doors, a young waiter was doing something breathtakingly stupid. He’d just finished clearing plates, his movements efficient and invisible, the way good staff are supposed to move. Then, glancing furtively around, he picked up a discarded, mostly untouched roll from a bread basket. He didn’t pocket it. He simply broke off a piece and put it in his mouth, his eyes closing for a half-second of pure, unguarded relief.
He was painfully young. Raven-haired, with a sharp, striking face that spoke of long hours and not enough food. His black waiter’s jacket was a little too big in the shoulders.
Derek watched him chew the stolen bread.
He watched the way the boy’s throat worked as he swallowed.
And in that moment, a reckless, crystalline idea snapped into place. It was insane. It was undignified. It was, he realized with a jolt, the only interesting thought he’d had all month.
“…June would be ideal for a wedding,” his mother was saying.
Derek stood up. The movement was so sudden his mother’s sentence died in her throat. He didn’t look at her. He didn’t look at his father’s puzzled frown or his sister’s raised eyebrow. He walked, each step measured and deliberate, across the ten feet of polished floor that separated his world from the waiter’s.
The boy saw him coming and froze, a deer in the brutal glare of La Perle’s chandeliers. A crumb clung to his lower lip. Derek reached out and took his wrist. The grip wasn’t gentle. The boy’s arm was thin, the bones close to the skin. He could feel a frantic pulse beating against his thumb.
Derek turned, pulling the young man slightly forward, facing his family’s table. His mother’s mouth was a perfect ‘O’ of outrage.
“Mother,” Derek announced, his voice carrying, clear and calm in the hushed room. “I’ve been keeping a secret. Meet the man who’s been sharing my bed for the past several months.” He felt the wrist in his grip jerk in shock. He tightened his hold. “We’re getting married in June.”
Silence. Utter, reverberating silence, broken only by the distant clatter of pans from the kitchen. Every eye in their section of the dining room was on them. Derek watched the colors of fury, confusion, and dawning horror play across his mother’s face.
The boy was staring at him, his warm brown eyes wide with a tidal wave of what-the-fuck. He looked from Derek’s implacable face to the sea of stunned society masks, then down at their joined hands. For one terrifying second, Derek thought the kid would yank free and bolt, leaving him standing there alone, a fool.
Then, something shifted. The boy’s shoulders, which had been hunched in fear, straightened. He wiped the crumb from his mouth with his free hand. The bewilderment in his eyes didn’t vanish, but it was joined by a flicker of something else—a sharp, assessing intelligence. He looked at Derek’s mother, who seemed to be struggling to breathe, and offered a small, awkward bow of his head.
“Um,” he said, his voice surprisingly steady. “Nice to meet you, ma’am. I’m Tsuyoshi.”
Derek’s father choked on his wine.
“You will excuse us,” Derek said, not a request. He kept his hold on Tsuyoshi’s wrist and began walking, not toward the exit, but toward the private elevator that led to the building’s penthouse offices. He needed to control the environment. Now.
They stepped into the plush, silent elevator. The doors closed, sealing them in golden light. Derek released his grip.
Tsuyoshi immediately rubbed his wrist, his breathing shallow. “What the hell was that?”
“An audition,” Derek said, watching the floor numbers climb. “You passed.”
“An audition for what? Who are you?”
“Derek Souss. And you’re Tsuyoshi…?”
“Yamamoto,” the boy supplied, suspicion hardening his gaze. “And you’re insane. They’re gonna fire me. I needed that job.”
The elevator doors opened directly into a vast, minimalist office. A wall of glass looked out over the sprawl of Los Angeles, a galaxy of lights muted by the room’s sophisticated gloom. “You no longer need that job,” Derek said, walking to a drinks cabinet. He poured two glasses of water, not offering one. “How much did you make there? A month.”
Tsuyoshi hovered near the elevator, as if ready to flee back to the world he understood. “Enough.”
“How much.”
“...Maybe two grand. After taxes? Less.”
Derek took a sip of water. “I will pay you twenty thousand dollars a month. For one year.”
Tsuyoshi’s defiant posture slipped. He stared. “To do what? Murder someone?”
“To be my husband.”
The laugh that burst from Tsuyoshi was short and harsh. “Right. ‘Cause that makes sense. Look, rich guy, I don’t know what game you’re playing—”
“It’s not a game,” Derek interrupted, his voice dropping to that quiet, dangerous register that made CEOs blanch. “My mother was about to successfully maneuver me into a marriage with a vacuous socialite whose only asset is a lapsed title. My disinterest in women is… a poorly kept secret. A liability, as she said. You,” he gestured with his glass, “are a solution. A compelling, unexpected, and mercifully temporary one.”
“So I’m, what, a prop?”
“You’re an employee. With a very specific contract. Public appearances. Limited social obligations. A convincing performance of affection in front of certain audiences. Absolute discretion. In return, you get two hundred and forty thousand dollars, an apartment in a secure building, and a wardrobe that doesn’t smell like other people’s food. At the end of one year, we amicably, quietly, divorce. You walk away with the money and no connection to me.”
Tsuyoshi was quiet. He walked slowly to the window, looking down at the city far below. Derek could see him weighing it. The humiliation against the money. The strangeness against the escape. He could see the exact moment the calculation tipped.
“Why me?” Tsuyoshi asked finally, turning from the window. “You could hire an actor. Someone who knows the script.”
Derek thought of the stolen bread, the closed eyes, the raw need. “Actors perform. What I need is someone who understands a transaction. Who won’t confuse the role with reality. You looked like a man who understands the price of things.”
Before Tsuyoshi could answer, a sharp click of heels echoed from the open elevator. A woman stood there, having entered the private code. She was stunning, dressed in a sheath dress the color of bone, her blonde hair a flawless wave. Vivienne Dubois.
Her eyes swept the room, from Derek to Tsuyoshi, taking in the scene, the intimacy of the late-night meeting, the young man in a waiter’s uniform in the CEO’s inner sanctum. Her smile was perfection, but her eyes were winter.
“Derek,” she said, her voice cool honey. “The board is asking about the Q3 projections. I said I’d find you.” Her gaze settled on Tsuyoshi. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”
Tsuyoshi said nothing. Derek answered for him. “Vivienne, this is Tsuyoshi Yamamoto. My fiancé.”
The silence that followed was different from the one in the restaurant. This was a vacuum, sucking all the air from the room. Vivienne’s perfect smile didn’t move a millimeter, but her knuckles whitened around the tablet she held. Derek watched her, almost clinically. He’d known of her hopes, of course. He’d simply never considered them.
“I see,” Vivienne said after a heartbeat that felt ten years long. “Congratulations. How… unexpected.” Her eyes finally left Tsuyoshi, slicing back to Derek. “The projections?”
“We’ll discuss them tomorrow, Vivienne. I’m occupied.”
Another pause. A microscopic tremor in her jaw. “Of course.” She turned and left, the click of her heels fading into the hum of the elevator descent.
Tsuyoshi let out a long, slow breath. “She hates me.”
“Yes,” Derek said. “She does. Get used to it.” He walked to his desk, pulled out a simple, pre-printed contract from a drawer, and laid it on the glass surface. “The offer stands for the next five minutes. After that, you go back downstairs, get fired, and we never speak of this. Your choice.”
Tsuyoshi looked from the contract to the city lights, then back to Derek’s impassive face. He walked to the desk, picked up the pen lying beside the paper, and without reading a single line—a gesture of either profound trust or profound desperation—signed his name.
He looked up at Derek. “What now?”
Derek allowed himself a small, private smile. It didn’t reach his eyes. “Now,” he said, “we go shopping. You can’t meet the press in a waiter’s jacket.” He tossed a heavy, brushed steel key across the desk. It skidded to a stop in front of Tsuyoshi. “Penthouse B. Down the hall. Be ready at nine.”
Alone in the office after Tsuyoshi had gone, Derek stood at the window. The lights of the city were a circuit board of endless, predictable connections. He’d just plugged in a wild card. He knew the risks. The scandal if it unraveled. Vivienne’s fury. His family’s humiliation.
But as he replayed the moment—the shock on his mother’s face, the defiant clarity in Tsuyoshi’s eyes when he said his name—he felt something unfamiliar. A faint, thrilling current of anticipation. It wasn’t emotion. It was the thrill of a high-stakes move, of a narrative he’d finally decided to write for himself.
Down the hall, in a penthouse that felt like a museum, Tsuyoshi Yamamoto stood in the middle of a living room larger than any place he’d ever lived. He placed the heavy key on a marble kitchen island. The silence was absolute. He thought of the stale taste of the stolen bread. He thought of the weight of the watch on Derek Souss’s wrist, worth more than his life.
He walked to the floor-to-ceiling window, placed his palm against the cool glass, and looked at the dizzying drop.
“Fuck it,” he said to his own reflection, a ghostly figure adrift in unimaginable luxury.
And he grinned.