Leo looked down at her hands again.

Raw. Split at the knuckles. Skin that had been forced to keep working long after it should have stopped. The kind of damage that didn’t come from one bad day, but from too many days that all looked the same.

“Your knuckles are bleeding,” he said.

She glanced at them briefly, as if the sight itself was an inconvenience she hadn’t authorized.

“They do that,” she replied.

“That shouldn’t be normal.”

Her shoulders lifted slightly in a shrug that wasn’t casual so much as practiced. “Neither should a stranger in a five-thousand-dollar suit crouching next to mop water, but here we are.”

A breath of something almost like laughter passed through him before he could stop it. It wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be. Leo Castellano didn’t laugh often, and when he did, people usually stopped talking to figure out why.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

The shift in her was immediate.

Like a door quietly locking.

“No.”

He blinked once. “No?”

“No,” she repeated. “You don’t get my name.”

A pause.

“Why not?”

She finally looked at him fully now, and whatever softness had been in her expression a moment ago was gone.

“Because men like you don’t ask questions unless the answers cost somebody something.”

The words didn’t feel rehearsed. That was what made them land harder.

Leo went still.

Men like you.

He didn’t correct her. Not yet. He’d learned that correcting people who were already braced for disappointment only made them hold on tighter to their assumptions.

The kitchen doors behind her swung open hard enough to rattle the frame.

“Caris!” a voice snapped from inside. “Are you done with that spill or should I hire a priest to bless it?”

She flinched.

Barely.

But Leo saw it.

Not the movement itself.

The instinct behind it.

She turned her head slightly toward the door. “Almost done,” she said, carefully even.

Then, quieter—so quiet it almost didn’t exist outside her mouth—her real name slipped into the air again.

Caris.

It didn’t belong in a space like this. It didn’t belong in a tone like that. It sounded wrong in the hands of people who used it without respect.

The kitchen door slammed shut again.

Silence returned, heavier than before.

Leo stood slowly, as if the air had changed density around him.

“Caris,” he said.

Her eyes snapped up immediately. Sharp. Defensive.

“Don’t say it like that.”

“Like what?”

He didn’t move closer. He didn’t need to. The distance between them had already shifted in a way that had nothing to do with space.

She hesitated.

For the first time, the answer wasn’t instant.

“Like it matters,” she said finally.

That landed differently.

Because Leo had spent most of his life around people who acted like everything mattered, but meant none of it.

And now he was looking at someone who acted like nothing mattered—because everything had already cost too much.