Chapter One: The Gala Ivy Bennett POV
Ivy had two hundred and eleven dollars in her checking account, a black dress she wore to her mother's funeral, and forty-eight hours to save her brother's life.
She stood across the street from the Cross Foundation's headquarters, watching valets swallow one gleaming car after another, and told herself this was still a good idea.
It wasn't. She had known that for about an hour now. But good ideas had stopped being an option the moment Dr. Okafor called to say Noah's surgery had been pulled from the schedule. Insurance covered part of it. Part wasn't enough. And somewhere in three sleepless nights of research, Cross Industries' foundation had turned into the last name on a very short list of people who could close that gap before Noah's heart gave out waiting.
She smoothed the front of her dress, tucked a curl behind her ear that immediately sprang back out, and walked toward the entrance like she had somewhere to be.
The guard at the door wasn't convinced.
"Invitation," he said, without looking up from his tablet.
"I'm meeting someone inside." Not technically a lie. She was about to meet someone. He just didn't know that yet.
"Name?"
Her mind blanked half a second too long, and that was all it took. His eyes came up; the dress a size too tight in the shoulders, the shoes that weren't quite right, the way her hand was locked around her clutch like it might float away without her.
"Ma'am, step aside, please."
"Please." The word cracked out of her before she could stop it. "Five minutes. That's all I need…"
"Ma'am."
A hand landed on his shoulder before he could reach for her arm. "I've got this."
The woman attached to the voice wore a headset and the flat, practiced patience of someone who had done this before: steering Ivy sideways, out of the flow of arriving guests, with a grip that was gentle and completely non-negotiable. "You can wait for your ride here, or I'll call you one."
Ivy looked past her. Past the golden light spilling out of the lobby, the chandelier the size of a small car, the wall of photographers flashing at someone just out of frame. She felt the whole plan going soft in her hands, like it was already slipping away from her.
She thought about Noah. Sixteen, propped up in a hospital bed three days ago, making jokes about how at least this got him out of his trig final. Not knowing yet that the surgery meant to fix his heart had just been cancelled. Not knowing his sister was standing outside a stranger's party about to get walked off the property by a woman in a headset.
She wasn't leaving like this.
"I need to see Damian Cross." Louder now; loud enough that a few heads turned near the door. "I know he's in there. Thirty seconds. That's it."
"Mr. Cross doesn't take meetings at galas."
"It's not a meeting. It's an emergency."
"Everyone's emergency is an emergency to them." The woman's voice didn't change, but something behind her eyes did; not sympathy exactly, more like recognition. She had heard this line before. Probably a hundred times, from a hundred people standing right where Ivy was standing now. "Go home. Try his office Monday."
Monday would be four days too late.
Ivy didn't so much decide what happened next as just watch her body do it; ducking left, slipping past a cluster of arriving guests, walking through the front doors like she'd been invited all along.
Nobody stopped her. That was the strange thing about moving fast enough and looking sure enough of yourself: for about eleven seconds, the whole room just assumes you belong.
The lobby swallowed her whole; marble underfoot, a string quartet somewhere she couldn't see, women in gowns that cost more than her shop's rent for a year, men who all seemed to already know each other. Nobody looked at her twice. She scanned the crowd until she found him.
He wasn't hard to find. He was the only person in the room nobody was laughing near.
Damian Cross stood by a wall of glass overlooking the city, a drink in his hand he hadn't touched once, listening to an older man talk with the flat, dead-eyed patience of someone counting the minutes until he could leave. Taller than his photos. Colder, too, somehow, even from across the room.
Ivy didn't give herself time to think about it. She crossed the floor before her nerve could catch up to her feet, walked past conversations that paused mid-sentence as she passed, and stopped directly in front of him.
"Mr. Cross. I need five minutes."
He turned. Grey eyes moved over her once, slow, cataloguing the dress, the desperation, the security woman now cutting across the lobby toward her at a dead sprint.
"Thirty seconds," he said. "Starting now."
That was the exact moment Ivy realized she had absolutely no idea what she was about to say.
