Rival Hearts

Chapter One: The Return

# Chapter One: The Return

The plane touched down in Aldermere just after nine, and I sat in my seat longer than I needed to, watching the runway lights blur past the window.

Five years. That was how long it had been since I left this city with a suitcase and a business plan I hadn't written yet, chasing a version of myself my father approved of. I had built that version carefully, in lecture halls three thousand miles away, in internships that ate my weekends, in a language of margins and quarterly projections I could now speak fluently. I told myself I was ready to bring it home.

I wasn't ready to actually be home. There's a difference, and nobody had ever warned me about it.

My driver was waiting outside baggage claim with a sign that just said ASHCOMBE, which felt about right. Not my name. The name.

"Welcome back, Miss Ashcombe," he said, reaching for my bags before I could stop him.

"Thanks." I almost told him to call me Wren. I didn't.

The car pulled through streets I used to know without thinking about them — the bakery on Hallow Street that never changed its awning, the church with the crooked steeple nobody had bothered to fix in decades, the hill where the houses got bigger and the hedges got taller the closer the road climbed toward my family's front gate. I watched it all pass and felt like a tourist in my own memory.

"Actually," I said, before we turned onto my street, "can you just drop me downtown? I want to walk for a bit."

He glanced at me in the mirror. "It's late, Miss Ashcombe."

"I know the city." I didn't, not anymore, not really. But I needed one more hour before I had to sit across from my parents and answer questions about my future with a straight face.

He let me out near the old part of downtown, close enough to walk. The air was colder than I remembered, salt-heavy off the water, and I pulled my coat tighter and started moving without much of a plan. I passed a jewelry shop that used to be a bookstore. A café that used to be nothing at all. Aldermere kept rearranging itself while I was gone, the way a room looks different after someone's moved the furniture even when the exact change is hard to name.

I found a bar two blocks in, the kind with low light and a bartender who didn't look up when the door opened, and I told myself one drink wouldn't hurt. I needed something to take the edge off the last five years before I let the next five swallow me whole.

The place was half empty. A few regulars at the far end, a couple in a booth not talking to each other, and one man at the bar who was clearly further into his night than anyone else in the room.

I didn't plan to notice him. He was just there, elbows on the counter, staring at a glass like it had personally wronged him. Good-looking, in the way that made it worse — the kind of face that probably worked for him most nights, wasted on someone who looked like he wanted the floor to open up.

I took the seat two down from him and ordered a whiskey, neat, and tried to disappear into it.

"You look like you're having a worse night than me," he said, without turning his head.

"I doubt that."

"Try me."

I hadn't planned on talking to anyone. But something about the exhaustion in his voice matched mine closely enough that I answered anyway. "I just got back into town after five years and I already regret it."

He laughed, short and humorless. "Five years. Cute. I've been dumped for exactly one, as of tonight." He lifted his glass in a mock toast. "Anniversary."

"That's rough."

"You have no idea." He finally turned to look at me, and whatever he saw made something shift in his expression — a squint, a slow once-over that lingered too long on all the wrong places. "You're not from around here."

"I am, actually."

"Sure." He said it like he didn't believe me, and something about his tone soured fast, the friendliness curdling into something else. He looked me over again, slow and appraising, like I was a car he was pricing out, and when he spoke next his voice had dropped, low and careless. "So what's your rate? For, you know. Company."

It took a second for the words to land, and when they did, they landed hard.

"Excuse me?"

"I'm not judging." He held up both hands, entirely too pleased with himself. "Just asking. You show up alone, dressed like that, sit down next to a stranger—"

"I am not a—" I couldn't even finish the sentence, the sheer insult of it robbing me of words for a second. Heat climbed up my neck, and I set my glass down harder than I meant to. "You have got to be joking."

"Relax." He didn't relax at all, just kept talking, oblivious to how far past a joke this had gone. "It's a compliment, if you think about it."

"It is not a compliment." My voice had risen enough that the bartender glanced over. I didn't care. "You don't know me. You don't know anything about me. And you just—" I stood, chair scraping back loud against the floor. "You know what, forget it. I hope you remember this in the morning, because I am going to find out exactly who you are, and I am going to make sure you regret ever opening your mouth tonight."

"Big talk," he muttered, already turning back to his drink like the conversation was beneath him.

"Try me," I said, throwing his own words back at him, and walked out before he could see how badly my hands were shaking.

The cold outside hit me like something solid. I stood on the curb for a full minute just breathing, replaying it, furious at him and furious at myself for the drink I hadn't finished and the hour I had wasted trying to feel normal before I even reached my parents' door.

I didn't get his name. I didn't need it, I told myself. Aldermere wasn't that big. I would find out exactly who he was — and when I did, he was going to answer for it.

I had no idea, standing there in the cold with my pulse still hammering, that I already knew exactly where to look. That in a city this small, with families like mine, I wouldn't have to search for him at all.

He was going to find me first.