STUCK BETWEEN BROTHERS

FIRST DAY, FIRST BLOOD

AURORA

Aurora’s mother had cried when she saw the salary on the offer letter — actually cried, sitting up in bed with the paper trembling in her thin hands, saying this is real money, Rory, this is real money like she still couldn’t quite believe good things happened to people like them without a catch attached.

Aurora hadn’t told her about the odd, unplaceable weight in Dorian Kingston’s voice when he’d said her last name. She’d decided it was nothing. Rich men were strange. That was simply a fact of the world, like weather.

Kingston Tower took up eleven floors of downtown Emeraldo City’s financial district, glass and steel rising so high that the elevator made Aurora’s ears pop twice before it opened onto the thirty-second floor. Her new badge — laminated, official, absurdly heavy for a piece of plastic — read AURORA BLAKE, EVENTS & HOSPITALITY COORDINATOR, and she’d looked at it in the elevator mirror for a solid ten seconds trying to convince herself it was real.

“You must be the new coordinator.” The voice came from a young woman leaning against the reception desk, immaculate in cream silk, holding a coffee cup like a prop rather than a beverage. “Dorian’s little hire. Word travels fast around here.”

Character Note — Priscilla Adair, 25. Priscilla is the only daughter of one of Kingston Group’s oldest board members, and has spent her entire life being told, gently and constantly, that she and Victor Kingston would make a beautiful match — a narrative she has fully adopted as fact despite Victor’s own complete lack of participation in it. She is sharp, socially fluent, and has an instinct for finding a person’s soft spot within minutes of meeting them. She does not consider herself cruel. She considers herself thorough.

“Aurora,” Aurora said, extending a hand that Priscilla looked at rather than shook.

“I know who you are.” Priscilla’s smile stayed perfectly in place, the kind of smile that had been practiced in front of a mirror since childhood. “Dorian mentioned he was bringing on some help for the boys. I just didn’t expect help to look quite so…” She let the sentence trail, eyes flicking once down Aurora’s blazer — sensible, secondhand, pressed within an inch of its life — and back up. “Resourceful.”

“I try,” Aurora said, keeping her voice light, filing the interaction under a category she’d learned to recognize years ago: not a threat yet, but watching to see if I’ll become one.

She didn’t have to wait long to find out where she stood.

Her desk, when she found it, sat in a glass-walled office adjacent to the events floor — small, but hers, with a KINGSTON GROUP mug already sitting on it that she was fairly sure Denise from the catering company would have murdered her for. She’d barely sat down when the door opened without a knock.

“So it’s true.” Victor Kingston leaned against her doorframe like he owned the building, which, Aurora reflected, he technically did. “My father hired the girl who told Timothy Blake to enjoy his champagne and choke on it.”

“I never said choke.”

“You implied it beautifully.” Victor stepped inside, dropping into the chair across from her desk without invitation, entirely at ease in a way that made the room feel smaller. “I’ve been trying to get someone to talk to Timothy like that for years. Usually it takes a lawsuit.”

“I have a gift,” Aurora said dryly, and was rewarded with the particular grin that she was beginning to suspect Victor deployed strategically, the way other people used punctuation.

“You do,” he said, and something in the way he said it — slower, quieter than the rest — made Aurora look up from her monitor. He held her gaze a beat too long, easy and unhurried, like he had nowhere else in the world he needed to be. “I meant to tell you Saturday, before my brother swept in with his whole knight in a three-piece suit routine. You were the most interesting thing at that entire party.”

“Higher bar than you’d think,” Aurora said. “There was a Renoir.”

“The Renoir didn’t make Timothy Blake’s ego c***k in front of forty guests. You did that for free.” Victor’s eyes crinkled at the corners when he laughed, genuine in a way that surprised her — she’d expected polish all the way through, and instead found something warmer underneath it, something that made her wonder how much of the charm was armor and how much was simply him. “I have a proposal.”

“I just started. I’m not agreeing to anything.”

“Wise.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and the teasing dropped half a register into something that felt, disarmingly, sincere. “Lunch. Not a date — a welcome. Every new hire gets one, it’s practically policy.” A beat. “I’m making that up. There’s no policy. I’d just like an excuse to keep talking to you before someone in this building convinces you we’re all insufferable.”

Aurora should have said no. She had a system for men like Victor Kingston — charming, wealthy, effortlessly certain the world would rearrange itself for their convenience — and the system was polite distance, professional smile, exit before it costs you anything. She opened her mouth to employ it.

“Okay,” she said instead, and hated herself a little for how easily it came out, and didn’t hate it nearly as much as she’d expected to.

Victor’s grin, when it landed, was the kind that made the glass-walled office feel considerably warmer than the air conditioning accounted for. “Noon. I’ll clear my calendar and pretend it’s for a business call.”

He was gone before she could take it back, and Aurora sat alone at her new desk, in her new blazer, with her new mug, feeling the particular vertigo of a life turning a corner she hadn’t seen coming.

Damien found her twenty minutes later, and the contrast nearly gave her whiplash.

He didn’t sit. He didn’t lean against anything. He stood in her doorway with a tablet in one hand and the same still, contained energy he’d had at the party — like a held breath that never quite released.

“You’re coordinating the Ashworth merger dinner,” he said, without preamble. “Friday. Twelve guests, three of whom hate each other, one of whom is currently suing my company. I need the seating chart to function as damage control, not decoration.”

“That’s specific,” Aurora said, already reaching for a notepad.

“I don’t do vague.” He set the tablet on her desk, screen angled toward her — a floor plan, a guest list, a document already half-annotated in tight, precise handwriting. “You handled Timothy Blake and my father’s entire guest list without a script. I’m trusting you can handle twelve people with grudges and a wine budget.”

It wasn’t a compliment, exactly. It landed like one anyway.

“I can handle it,” Aurora said.

Damien studied her for a moment — not the way Timothy had, not the unhurried warmth of Victor’s gaze, but something more careful, more guarded, like a man checking a structure for weight it might not be built to hold. “I believe you,” he said finally, and there was something almost reluctant in the admission, like trust cost him more than it cost most people. “That’s rarer than you’d think, in this building.”

He left before she could ask what he meant by that either — Aurora was beginning to suspect the entire Kingston family communicated primarily in unfinished sentences and things they’d rather imply than say outright — and she sat back in her chair, one hand still resting on Damien’s tablet, feeling the particular whiplash of having been looked at, in the space of twenty minutes, by two brothers who couldn’t have been less alike and somehow both made her feel exactly, uncomfortably seen.

Priscilla Adair watched all of it through the glass wall, coffee cup forgotten in her hand, filing every second of it away.