"Not Knowing His Poor Ex Had Married A Mafia Boss, He Kicked Her At The Mall

The galleria did not smell like a mall. It smelled like cedarwood, ozone, and the kind of wealth that insulated you from the weather. Sadi hated it. She stood near the entrance of a high-end boutique, her fingers resting lightly against the glass display case. Inside sat a pair of rhodium cufflinks. Simple. Understated. She tilted her head, wondering if Roman would actually wear them, or if they would just end up in the velvet-lined graveyard of his dresser drawer.

Probably the latter. Roman didn’t care for accessories. He cared for control.

She shifted her weight, the soles of her pristine white sneakers squeaking faintly against the polished marble floor. She was dressed in a pair of loose denim jeans and an oversized cashmere sweater—a sweater alone that cost more than her rent used to be for an entire year. But it didn’t scream money. Sadi preferred it that way.

She had spent twenty-six years scraping pennies, sleeping in cars, wearing coats with busted zippers. You didn’t just wash off poverty. It soaked into your bones. It dictated how you walked into a room, how you apologized to salespeople for simply browsing, how you braced yourself for the worst.

"I said, move."

The voice clipped the air behind her—familiar and sharp. A cold spike of adrenaline hit the base of Sadi’s neck. She didn’t turn around. She didn’t need to. The brain remembers the pitch and cadence of the person who broke you.

Trevor.

Before she could process the impossibility of him being here, a hard, sharp force slammed into her right calf. It wasn’t a bump. It wasn’t an accidental nudge. It was a deliberate, violent kick from the pointed toe of an Italian leather dress shoe. The impact buckled Sadi’s leg. She pitched sideways, her shoulder colliding hard with the glass display case before she crumpled onto the marble floor. The dull thud of her knee hitting the ground echoed through the quiet boutique.

A few shoppers turned their heads. The sales associate behind the counter gasped, taking a half-step forward before freezing. Sadi stayed on the floor for a second, the cold stone biting through the denim of her jeans. A hot, stinging pain radiated from her calf. She blinked, the cedarwood scent of the store suddenly making her nauseous.

"Jesus, are you deaf?" Trevor’s voice floated above her, dripping with manufactured exasperation. "People are trying to walk here. We don’t need vagrants blocking the—" He stopped.

Sadi pushed herself up onto one knee. She didn’t scramble. She didn’t cry out. She just slowly lifted her head, pushing a stray strand of dark hair out of her eyes.

Trevor stood two feet away. He looked exactly the same, yet entirely different. He wore a sharp, tailored navy suit that fit him a little too tightly around the shoulders. His hair was slicked back with expensive pomade, his watch oversized and gaudy. He looked like a man desperately trying to play a part in a theater production he couldn’t afford tickets to. Hanging off his arm was a blonde woman in a cream silk dress, her lips parted in a mixture of theatrical shock and mild disgust.

Trevor stared down at Sadi. The arrogance in his eyes flickered, replaced briefly by recognition, and then almost instantly twisted into something ugly and defensive.

"Sadi," he said. He dragged her name through the dirt just by speaking it.

She didn’t answer right away. She pulled herself up to her feet, leaning slightly on her left leg to keep the weight off her bruised right calf. She brushed a speck of invisible dust from her jeans. Her knee throbbed. She looked at him. Really looked at him.

This was the man she had worked eighty-hour weeks for at the diner down on 4th Street. The man whose bar exam prep courses she had bought with tips stuffed into mayonnaise jars. The man who had packed his bags in the middle of the night three years ago, taking her last six hundred dollars from the emergency envelope under the mattress, leaving behind only a grease-stained sticky note that read: *I need to find my own path.*

"What are you doing here?" Trevor demanded, his voice rising a fraction of an octave. He let go of the blonde woman’s arm and stepped closer to Sadi, invading her space with that same puffed-up chest he used whenever his ego felt fragile. "Are you following me?"

Sadi let out a short, dry breath that might have been a laugh, if there was any humor in it. "Following you?"

"Don’t play stupid," Trevor snapped. He looked her up and down, his eyes catching the unbranded denim and the plain white sneakers. He couldn’t read the fabric. He only saw what he wanted to see—the girl he had left behind in the dirt. "My firm’s office is two blocks away. You think it’s a coincidence you’re loitering in the most expensive galleria in the city on a Tuesday afternoon? Looking like that?"

The blonde woman chimed in, adjusting her designer handbag with a manicured hand. "Babe, who is this? Do you know this person? Why did you kick her?"

"She was in the way, Chloe," Trevor said dismissively, though his eyes never left Sadi. "She’s nobody. An old roommate from college who couldn't let go. Sadi, seriously. If you came here to beg for money, you’ve got another thing coming. I don't owe you anything. You made your choices, and I made mine."

"You kicked me, Trevor," Sadi said. Her voice was remarkably steady. It lacked the frantic tears he had been used to seeing whenever they fought over unpaid electric bills. That quiet tone made Trevor’s jaw clench.

"I gave you a wake-up call," Trevor sneered, leaning in close enough that Sadi could smell his overbearing cologne. "You're blocking the entrance to a store where a single tie costs more than your monthly rent. You don't belong here. Look at yourself. You look like you just walked off an assembly line. Go back to whatever slum you crawled out of before I call security and have you thrown out on the street where you belong."

"Is that a threat?" Sadi asked softly.

"It’s a promise," Trevor said, his face twisting into a smug, venomous grin. "I’m an associate partner at Sterling & Hayes now. I have real connections. You’re still nobody, Sadi. You’ll always be nobody."

Behind them, the faint, steady sound of footsteps clicked against the marble.

Not rushed. Not loud. Just a rhythmic, heavy tread that carried an undeniable gravity.

Sadi didn’t need to look. She felt the subtle drop in atmospheric pressure that always accompanied Roman’s entrance.

"Is there an issue here?"