CHAPTER ONE
The divorce papers were still warm from the printer when Aisha Fon walked into the boardroom and saw the one man she had spent three years trying to forget.
She didn't flinch. She had trained herself not to.
Kael Donovan sat at the head of the table like he owned it — because he did. Dark suit, darker eyes, jaw sharp enough to cut glass. He looked exactly the same as the night he had walked out of her life without a single word of explanation. Not one year older. Not one ounce less dangerous.
And he was looking straight at her.
"Ms. Fon." His voice was low, controlled. A voice that had once whispered her name in the dark like a prayer. "I wasn't expecting you."
Aisha set her briefcase down on the table, pulled out her chair, and sat directly across from him.
"That makes two of us," she said coolly.
The other executives in the room shifted uncomfortably. They could feel it — that invisible current running between the two of them, electric and sharp and unresolved. Nobody spoke. Nobody dared.
Aisha had not come here for Kael Donovan. She had come here to save her company. The startup she had built from a studio apartment in Buea with nothing but a laptop, a dream, and more stubbornness than any one woman had a right to possess. Five years of her life poured into TechNova. Five years of eighteen-hour days and cold meals and missed birthdays.
She was not going to lose it because the bank had sold her debt to him.
She opened her folder and slid a document across the table.
"My restructuring proposal. You'll find the repayment terms reasonable and the projections conservative. I don't do optimistic fiction, Mr. Donovan. Only facts."
Kael didn't touch the document. He kept his eyes on her face, studying her the way he always had — like she was a puzzle he both wanted to solve and was afraid to finish.
"You look well, Aisha."
"I look busy," she corrected. "Are we doing business or small talk? Because I have a company to run."
Something moved behind his eyes. Something that almost looked like admiration. Or guilt. With Kael, she had never quite learned the difference.
He reached forward and picked up her proposal.
The room exhaled.
Aisha kept her expression perfectly blank while her heart beat a war drum against her ribs. She was good at this — the performance of being unbothered. She had perfected it the night she found his apartment empty, his number disconnected, and his name erased from everything they had shared like she had imagined him entirely.
She had cried exactly once. For four hours, on her bathroom floor, with the shower running so her roommate wouldn't hear.
Then she had stood up, washed her face, and decided that no man — not even Kael Donovan — would be the reason she fell apart.
He flipped through the pages slowly, deliberately. She watched his hands. She had always noticed his hands. Steady. Precise. The hands of a man who never did anything without intention.
Which made what he had done to her three years ago even harder to understand.
"This is impressive," he said finally.
"I know."
The corner of his mouth twitched. Almost a smile. "You haven't changed."
"You have no idea what I've changed." She closed her folder. "So. Do we have a deal?"
Kael set the proposal down and leaned back in his chair, and for one long, unbearable moment, he just looked at her. Like he was memorizing her. Like he was apologizing for something he didn't have the words for yet.
"I'll need two weeks to review it fully."
"You have one."
The almost-smile again. "One week," he agreed.
Aisha stood, buttoned her blazer, and picked up her briefcase. She nodded once at the room and walked toward the door with her head high and her steps even.
She made it all the way to the elevator before her hands started shaking.
She pressed the button for the ground floor and stared at her reflection in the steel doors — composed, professional, untouchable.
You're fine, she told herself. He's just a man.
But the elevator doors slid open, and she caught herself wondering if he had watched her walk out of the room.
She told herself she didn't care.
She was almost convinced.
