Chapter 4: Jealousy
The library had always been Kai’s sanctuary, a place where the world’s demands were softened by the quiet weight of history and the comforting scent of old paper. Today, however, the silence felt brittle, a thin veneer over a chaos she couldn’t name. She pretended to examine the spine of a first edition Eliot, her fingers tracing the gold-leaf letters without seeing them.
“I’m telling you, the merger is going to be a bloodbath for the smaller firms,” Allan said, stretching his legs out towards the fireplace. He swirled the amber liquid in his crystal tumbler. “But your father’s position is rock solid. Absolutely rock solid.”
“Mmm,” Kai murmured, a non-committal sound she’d perfected over years of similar conversations. Her attention was fractured, pulled to the other side of the room where Emma and her cousin, Liam, were laughing.
Liam. Of all people. He was harmless, really—a lanky, affable business student with more family money than ambition. He’d always had a obvious, puppy-dog sort of crush on Emma, which Emma had, until now, deftly deflected with gentle teasing. Today was different.
Emma was glowing, her laughter a little too bright, her gestures a little too expansive. She was performing, and Kai was the only audience member who knew it. She wore a thin, silky camisole that slipped off one shoulder, and her feet were tucked up under her on the Chesterfield sofa. She looked utterly at home, a vibrant weed in a garden of cultivated roses.
“So, Liam,” Emma said, her voice cutting through Allan’s market analysis. “Tell me again about that club you love so much. The one with the terrible name.”
“The Gilded Cage?” Liam grinned, leaning towards her. “It’s not terrible, it’s ironic. And the DJ is actually incredible. You’d love it.”
“The Gilded Cage,” Emma repeated, her eyes flickering, for a fraction of a second, towards Kai. “Sounds like my kind of place.”
A cold knot tightened in Kai’s stomach. She took a slow sip of her whiskey, the burn doing little to warm the sudden chill in her veins.
“We should all go,” Allan said, ever the genial host. “Make a night of it. What do you think, Kai?”
Before she could answer, Liam said something low to Emma, something Kai couldn’t hear. Emma threw her head back and laughed, a real, throaty sound that seemed to vibrate in the quiet room. Then, in a movement that was both casual and deliberate, Liam leaned in and pressed a soft, lingering kiss to Emma’s cheek.
Time didn’t stop. It distorted. The crackle of the fire became deafening. Kai saw the way Emma’s eyes slid closed, the faint, complacent smile that played on her lips. She saw the possessive way Liam’s hand rested on her shoulder.
A white-hot spike of something pure and vicious lanced through Kai’s chest. It was so sudden, so physical, it stole her breath. Her fingers clenched around the cool glass. She wanted to cross the room and peel Liam’s hand away. She wanted to wipe the memory of his lips from Emma’s skin. The violence of the impulse left her dizzy.
“Kai?” Allan’s voice was laced with concern. “You alright? You’ve gone pale.”
She forced her grip to relax, muscle by muscle. She arranged her features into what she hoped was a look of mild amusement. “I’m fine. Just… a lot of whiskey on an empty stomach.” The excuse was weak, but it was all she had.
She couldn’t look away from them. Emma’s gaze met hers across the room. There was a challenge in those dark eyes, a triumphant, gleaming question. See? they seemed to say. See what you’re missing? See what I can do?
And Kai did see. She saw it all with a terrifying, crystalline clarity. The performance wasn’t for Liam. It was for her. Every laugh, every flirtatious tilt of the head, that kiss—all of it was a weapon aimed directly at the fortress of her composure.
The emotion she couldn’t name now had a shape, a temperature. It was a searing, possessive jealousy. It was ugly and undeniable. It felt like a betrayal of everything she was supposed to be, of the calm, ordered future that awaited her with Allan.
She felt Allan’s hand on her arm, a steadying pressure. “You sure you’re okay?”
“Yes,” she said, her voice tighter than she intended. She pulled her arm away gently, under the pretense of setting her glass down on the mantelpiece. The need to get out of the room, to escape the sight of them, was a physical ache. “Actually, I think I might have a bit of a headache coming on. Would you all excuse me? I just need some air.”
She didn’t wait for a response. She walked towards the library’s great oak doors, her posture perfectly straight, her steps measured. She could feel Emma’s eyes on her back, a tangible weight.
As the door clicked shut behind her, leaving the muffled sounds of the room behind, she leaned against the cool wall of the hallway, her breath escaping in a shaky rush. She pressed the heels of her hands against her closed eyes, trying to erase the image burned onto her retina: Emma, bathed in firelight, yielding to another’s touch.
The problem wasn’t that Liam was kissing Emma.
The problem, the terrifying, world-altering problem, was that Kai desperately, fiercely, wanted it to be her.