Prologue
Nadia
The elevator doors open and I already knew I should leave. and the low, expensive lighting turning everything the color of a secret, I knew exactly what walking through that door was going to cost me.
I walked through it anyway.
That is the whole story, really. Everything else is just the details.
---
He is standing at the window when I step inside, the city spread out behind him fifty floors below like something staged, like the world arranged itself specifically to make him look exactly like this. Unreachable. Inevitable. The kind of man you build a very specific kind of damage around without realizing you are doing it until the walls are already up and you are already inside them.
He turns when he hears the door.
He does not look surprised to see me. That is the thing that undoes me every single time, the thing I have never found a satisfying defense against. He never looks surprised. He looks like he has been waiting, quiet and certain, the way he does everything, and the sight of me only confirms something he already knew was coming.
He says my name.
Just that. Just my name, in that low, unhurried way that makes it sound less like a name and more like a choice he has already made and is no longer interested in debating.
And I think about my father.
I think about the photograph on his desk, the one that has been slightly crooked in its silver frame for as long as I can remember. Two young men grinning at the beginning of everything, before the money, before the empires, before the thirty years of loyalty that my father has never once had reason to question.
I think about what his face will look like when he finds out.
Because he will find out. I know that the way I know my own reflection. Not if. When.
I think about all of it, clearly and completely, in the space of a single breath.
Then, Callum crosses the room toward me and every careful, reasonable thought I have dissolves the way it always does when the distance between us disappears, like sense was only ever something I was capable of, and up close it simply has no jurisdiction.
His hand comes up to my face.
I let it.
"You came," he says quietly.
"I shouldn't have," I tell him. Which is true. Which has always been true, every single time, and has never once been enough to make me turn around.
He looks at me for a long moment, this man who is twenty years older than me, who is my father's best friend, who is promised to someone else, who has no business looking at me the way he is looking at me right now.
"No," he agrees. "You shouldn't have."
Neither of us moves.
Outside, fifty floors below, the city continues without us. Indifferent and bright and entirely unconcerned with two people standing in a hotel suite making a decision that is going to change everything.
He leans down, his breath hot and ragged against my lips. I close my eyes, my body aching with anticipation. His mouth crashes into mine in a fierce, devouring kiss, deep, urgent, and burning with raw, unspoken hunger.
And that moment, I stopped thinking about my father.
---
