Double Life of Millionaire Wife

Matías kills the music with one finger.

The bass drops into a sudden, aching quiet, and the whole room of bodies turns its hunger toward the stage. Serena feels it from backstage, even before she steps through the curtain line. Heat rises under her collarbone. Not just from the lights.

She’s not Serena here. Not the wife in the emerald gown who smiled for donors under a chandelier thirty minutes ago. Here she’s Selene, hair down in dark waves, mouth painted deeper, a black slip dress hidden under a cropped jacket she can actually breathe in.

The stage light above the mic ticks and flickers. Once. Twice. A warning.

Matías catches her wrist as she passes the sound booth stairs. His hand is firm, warm, familiar. He doesn’t tug. He just stops her, the way a man stops a door from closing.

“Your real name,” he says quietly. “In my booth. That’s new.”

She freezes. He shouldn’t use it. Not out loud.

His thumb rubs once over the inside of her wrist, and she hates how her body answers. There’s gold leaf there, a tiny glittering smear she didn’t wash off after the art piece she handled at the charity auction. It flashes when the backstage light hits it.

“I don’t have time,” she says.

“You do.” His gaze drops to her throat, to the onyx pendant that never comes off. “You just spend it on everyone else.”

A laugh pushes at her, sharp and tired. “The driver’s tracking time. If I’m not at the curb when he pulls up, Graham will know I wasn’t where I said.”

Matías’s jaw tightens. “And if that light dies mid-song, half this room will have their phones out searching for you. You want to gamble on being seen?”

He steps closer into her space, not crowding her, but making the air feel thinner. The cedar-smoke scent of him folds around her. His fingers slide from her wrist to her palm, their hands fitting too well.

“Tell me what you want tonight,” he says. “Not what he expects.”

The stage light ticks again overhead, and somewhere out front someone whistles for Selene. Serena’s pulse stutters. Matías’s hand is steady, waiting for her to decide whether to come into the booth with him or run back to the life that owns her calendar.