Fell For The Wrong Billionaire

Chapter 1: The Woman Who Never Looked Back

Talia's POV

The dream always started the same way.

Rain, coming down so hard it stopped sounding like rain — just static, just noise. Blood on white marble, spreading slow.

A woman stood in front of me. I never saw her face. Just her back, her arms stretched wide, pushing me behind her like I weighed nothing.

"Never trust a Sinclair."

Her voice cracked on the last word.

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. It never did.

Then her hand let go of mine.

I woke up gasping, sheets twisted around my legs. My heart slammed against my ribs. For a moment the dark ceiling above me belonged to a stranger, the cold air belonged to a stranger, until the room settled back into itself.

My room. My cabin. My mountain.

I pressed a hand to my chest — it wouldn't stay still — and counted my breaths the way I'd taught myself years ago.

In for four. Hold for four. Out for four.

By the tenth breath my heartbeat slowed enough that I noticed my face was wet.

"It's not real," I whispered to the empty room.

The words came out flat, unconvinced, the way a lie sounds different in your own mouth. But saying it stopped the shaking, and some mornings that was the only mercy I got.

I lay there chasing the last thread of her — some piece of her face before it dissolved, sand slipping through fingers no matter how tightly I closed my hand. I never could hold it. Just the voice. Just her hand around mine, and then the empty space where it used to be.

The cabin was quiet when I finally got up. I used to call that peace. Before Mara died, the silence sounded like safety. Now it sounded like something waiting.

I made coffee with hands that still weren't steady and stood at the window while morning climbed over the mountains, the snow on the peaks catching fire for a few minutes before settling back into white, like it had never happened.

It was beautiful up here. Most days, that was enough.

I carried my coffee out to the workshop, boots crunching over frost-hard grass. Sawdust, old varnish, something steady and known. A Victorian writing desk sat in the corner, legs stripped bare, waiting on me the way it had been waiting for a week.

I ran my fingers along the grain and let the shape of it pull me out of my own head.

Sanding down damage. Filling in the cracks. Finding the good wood hiding under years of neglect. There was something about this work — the idea that broken things got to stay useful, maybe even beautiful, once someone cared enough to look past what had been done to them.

I worked through the morning like I was trying to outrun something. Stained the desk legs. Fixed a hairline crack in an old rocking chair. Let the dream fade to the back of my mind, the way it always did if I gave myself something heavy enough to hold.

It was almost noon when I remembered the box.

Mara's box had been sitting on my kitchen table for four days. I'd walked past it every morning, every night, telling myself I'd deal with it later. Later kept turning into tomorrow.

Mara Halden raised me from the time I was seven. She wasn't my mother — not by blood, not that I'd ever been told — but she was the only mother I had any memory of. She died three weeks ago, quiet and peaceful in her sleep, the way she'd always said she wanted.

The lawyer had pressed the box into my hands after the funeral. "She wanted you to have this," he'd said. "She said you'd know when to open it."

I hadn't known. I still didn't.

I sat down at the table and pulled the box toward me like it might bite. Old photographs curling at the edges. A few pieces of her jewelry. A stack of letters bound in ribbon gone soft and gray with age — I hadn't touched those yet.

Underneath it all, one envelope. Cream-colored. Sealed. My name across the front in Mara's careful handwriting.

‘Talia.’

The way she used to write it on birthday cards, on notes left on the counter.

I picked it up. My hands weren't steady. I turned it over once, twice — heavier than a letter should be.

I broke the seal.

No note fell out. Just a key, dropping into my open hand with a small metallic sound that seemed too loud for the quiet kitchen.

An old brass key, tarnished dark at the edges. Not a house key — nothing I recognized, nothing that matched any lock in this cabin or any cabin I'd ever lived in. A small engraving near the top, worn nearly smooth by years of someone's thumb running over it the way mine was running over it now.

I turned it in my fingers, waiting for it to make sense.

It didn't.

"What were you keeping from me?"

My voice came out smaller than I meant it to, swallowed by the empty kitchen, the same way it always got swallowed in the dream.

Mara had never once, in twenty years, handed me anything without an explanation. ‘Secrets between people who loved each other were just wounds nobody had bothered to treat’, she used to say. She believed in saying things out loud, no matter how much it hurt going down.

So why leave me a key and nothing else?

I dug back through the box, hoping I'd missed something. There was nothing. Just the key, cold in my palm, holding a question I had no way to answer.

I picked up my phone. Set it back down.

Doors that had stayed shut this long usually stayed shut for a reason.

It can wait, I told myself.

I put the key back in its envelope, the envelope back in the box, and carried the box to my bedroom closet, sliding it behind the sweaters I never wore.

It didn't make the question go away. It just made it quieter.

I was good at that.

By evening the sky had turned that deep bruised blue it only wore up here, and wind moved through the pines outside — a low, steady hush that used to lull me to sleep and tonight just made the cabin feel smaller.

I made soup and ate it standing at the counter. Setting a table for one had started to feel like a decision I didn't want to make every night.

My mind kept circling back to the dream. ‘Never trust a Sinclair’. I'd had same version of that dream my whole life — the rain, the woman, the blood spreading across white marble. But the words were new.

Or maybe they weren't. Maybe I'd just never let myself keep them before.

I didn't know anyone named Sinclair. Never heard it spoken outside that dream, not once in twenty-seven years — and yet it sat behind my ribs like something I already knew the shape of.

It doesn't mean anything, I told myself. Dreams don't have to mean anything. Mine never had before.

I checked the locks before bed — front door, back door, the kitchen window that always stuck a little — until I heard the small click that meant it was safe. The same routine, more habit now than fear

.

I paused at the front door, glancing out through the small window beside it to watch the snow. It had been falling on and off all evening, soft and steady, dusting the porch steps white.

That was when I saw them.

Footprints.

I went still before my mind caught up to why.

Fresh. Deep, sharp-edged in the snow, not softened by wind the way older prints would be. Whoever made them hadn't been gone long.

They came in from the tree line in a straight, deliberate path, crossed my yard without wandering, and stopped directly beneath my bedroom window.

My hand was still resting on the lock I'd just turned. It wouldn't move.

I looked again, hoping the wind had done something strange to the snow, hoping my tired eyes had turned it into something it wasn't.

I hadn't been wrong.

There were no footprints leading away.