Manhattan nights are never truly silent, but inside the master suite of the Caldwell estate, the stillness felt suffocating. Julian Theodore Caldwell did not sleep that night.
It wasn't the caffeine coursing through his veins, nor the mountain of JTC documents awaiting his attention. Instead, it was an image looping relentlessly against the back of his eyelids, a jagged, broken film strip stuck on a single, agonizing frame.
Sean. Scarlett. And a camera angle calculated with a predator's precision.
Logically, Julian knew it was a trick of perspective. As a man who had spent half his life in front of a lens, he understood exactly how a camera could be forced to lie. But his chest was no place for logic. Every time he tried to close his eyes, he wasn't met with technical facts, but with something primal.
