Chapter Five
Queens looked different at night—hungrier, edgier, like the air itself was holding secrets it hoped you wouldn’t ask about.
The bar Catherine chose sat on a corner that smelled like old rain and older regrets. Inside, everything was dim and amber-colored: hanging Edison bulbs, sticky tables, a jukebox that hadn’t worked since the Clinton administration. The whole place reeked of whiskey, cigarette smoke, and the kind of conversations people only had when they didn’t expect to see morning.
Catherine fit right in tonight.
She took a seat in the back booth, the cracked leather sticking to her thighs as she slid in. She ordered a drink—something she didn’t bother to pronounce, something that burned on the way down—but even that wasn’t enough to steady her pulse.
Her fingers tapped against the glass.
Her leg bounced beneath the table.
Her thoughts were a mess of Caleb’s late nights, strange cologne, and the way silence had become the third occupant of their house.
The door opened.
She didn’t look. Not yet.
Instead, she listened—to the heavy steps, the scrape of a chair, the bartender’s low mutter. The room shifted, energy thickening in a way Catherine had learned to recognize.
Then a voice, smooth as smoke and twice as dangerous:
“You picked an interesting place to meet, Catherine.”
Her breath caught.
She looked up.
Marcus was standing in front of her.
He didn’t belong in a bar like this—too clean-cut, too sharp, too composed. He wore a dark coat, open at the collar, and when his eyes locked onto hers, the rest of the room faded like it had been waiting for permission to disappear.
Catherine forced a smile she didn’t feel. “You came.”
“Of course I did.” Marcus slid into the seat across from her, leaning back effortlessly, like he’d been here a hundred times. “You sounded… uneasy.”
Uneasy.
That was one word for it.
She took another sip of her drink. It didn’t help.
Marcus watched her with the kind of patience that felt both comforting and unsettling. He had always seen too much. Asked too little. A dangerous combination.
“You wanna tell me why you called?” he asked softly.
Catherine’s fingers tightened around the glass. “I just… I needed to talk to someone who isn’t lying to me.”
Marcus’s jaw flexed—so slight she almost missed it. “Caleb again?”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.
He let out a breath, slow and controlled. “If he’s hurting you—”
“He’s not,” she cut in quickly, then corrected herself. “Not physically.”
Marcus’s eyes darkened. Not with anger, but something far heavier.
The bartender placed a drink in front of him, and Marcus didn’t look away from Catherine even as he took his first sip.
Outside, sirens wailed in the distance.
Inside, the silence between them sharpened until she felt it pressing against her ribs.
Marcus leaned forward. “Tell me what happened.”
Catherine swallowed hard.
She had come here for answers.
Instead, she found herself drowning in the kind of attention she hadn’t felt in months—steady, focused, unflinching.
Marcus wasn’t supposed to matter.
But tonight, in a bar reeking of bad decisions—
He did.