Untitled Episode
CHAPTER 1
Alira
The Pacific didn't roar against the cliffs of the Gold Coast. It shattered.
I stood at the iron railing at the edge of Oceana Crest University while the wind whipped my black hair across my face. Two hundred feet below, the water heaved against the black rocks, navy and white, throwing itself at the stone again and again.
I held the cold iron until my knuckles went pale.
Ten years.
It had been ten years since the news anchors played that footage on every television in the country. They called it a tragic accident. They said my father had lost control on the coastal highway and driven straight into this stretch of water.
They didn't know about the poison in his whiskey, poured in the Sterling boardroom three hours earlier. They didn't know the crash was only a cleanup, because his heart had been too stubborn to stop on its own.
And they didn't know that the same night my father sank to the bottom of the ocean, I was squeezed into a dark closet, holding my breath, while strange men put two bullets into my mother's chest on the other side of the slatted door.
I closed my eyes and let the cold spray hit my face. The scar on my left shoulder started to sting, the way it always did when I thought about that night. It was the mark from the window I crawled out of before I ran until my lungs bled.
Breathe, Alira.
I opened my eyes and shoved the ghosts back into the corner of my mind where they belonged. I wasn't that terrified ten-year-old anymore. I wasn't the starving teenager begging behind diners for scraps.
I shifted my weight and felt the six-inch blade strapped inside my boot, hidden under the hem of my jeans. Elara had made sure of that. The woman who pulled me off the streets never offered me a shoulder to cry on. She gave me a knife, a bruised jaw, and a mission. Tears don't stop bullets, she used to say, wiping the blood from my mouth after training. A sharper blade does.
I turned my back on the cliff and on the father I barely got to know.
Time to go to work.
Oceana Crest was less a school than a playground for the very rich. It sprawled across the coastal peak in glass and steel and clipped green lawns. Everywhere I looked, I saw trust funds. Girls in four-thousand-dollar skirts walked arm in arm, laughing with their perfect teeth. Boys tossed Aston Martin keys in the air like loose change. I didn't care about any of it.
They were beautiful and untouchable, and not one of them knew a predator had just walked onto their campus.
I fixed the strap of my bag and slid into Alira Thorne. That was my alias, the quiet, wealthy orphan of an overseas oil tycoon, here for her freshman year. I was supposed to be shy. Pretty, but approachable.
The perfect prey.
I climbed the wide stone steps to the courtyard with my head slightly bowed and my eyes moving, counting everything. Cameras at the north and south gates. Two guards by the library. A blind spot behind the western lecture hall. My pulse stayed steady in the low sixties. Elara had beaten the panic out of me years ago.
My target was somewhere in that crowd of spoiled heirs. The boy whose family had destroyed mine.
Braxton Sterling.
Sole heir to the Sterling empire, king of Oceana Crest. My job was simple. Get close, make him trust me, tear his family's empire apart from the inside, and then finish him.
I was so busy matching faces to the dossier Elara had made me memorise that I broke my own first rule. I didn't watch my blind side.
I stepped back to dodge a group of girls rushing for the café, and my heel caught on the uneven stone. I braced for the ground. It never came.
I hit a wall of muscle and heat instead.
Before I could gasp, two big hands closed around my waist. It wasn't the polite, apologetic catch of a stranger. The grip was hard and possessive, and fear shot through my chest and straight into my blood.
The scent reached me first. Cedarwood, mint, and a faint sting of expensive liquor. It was sharp, and I breathed it in before I could stop myself.
"Careful."
His voice rumbled against my ear, low and rough. A shiver ran down my spine, and I hated it.
I spun around, every instinct telling me to drop my bag and go for the blade in my boot. Then I froze.
I had to look up. And up.
He was easily six foot four, a full head over my five-seven, and he blocked out the morning sun. His dark jacket hung open over a plain black shirt that did nothing to hide his wide shoulders. A tribal tattoo curled out from under the rolled sleeve on his right forearm.
But it was his face that stopped my breath.
He was beautiful in a way that felt like a warning. Sharp jaw. Sun-bleached hair that looked like he'd just dragged his hands through it. And dark amber eyes, fixed on me.
Braxton Sterling.
He was standing right in front of me. I had studied his photo for months and thrown darts at his smug face on my bedroom wall. The photos hadn't prepared me for how heavy he felt in person.
I had to act. I had to be the shy, flustered new girl. I let out a small gasp and stepped back to put some space between us.
He didn't let go.
His hands stayed on my waist, holding me where I was. The heat of his palms came through my thin shirt.
"I… I'm sorry," I stammered, pitching my voice higher and widening my eyes. "I wasn't watching where I was going. Thanks for catching me."
I waited for the Sterling smirk. I waited for the arrogant rich-boy line I could use to start reeling him in.
Braxton didn't smile.
His eyes dropped from mine, slid down my neck, and stopped for half a second on my left shoulder, right where my jacket covered the scar. It felt like he could see straight through the cloth.
Then he stepped closer, closing the gap I'd tried to make. The smell of cedar and mint wrapped around me.
He lowered his head until his lips were an inch from my ear. My heart pounded against my ribs, wrecking the calm face I was trying so hard to hold.
"You're standing a little too close to the edge, Alira," he whispered. It sounded a lot like a warning.
My whole body went cold.
I hadn't spoken to anyone yet. I hadn't checked in at admissions. I didn't even have my student ID.
There was no way he should know my name.
He pulled back, and a slow smirk curved his mouth. My stomach dropped. He let go of my waist, trailing his fingertips down my hip, just long enough that I felt it after he'd gone. Then he turned and walked away without looking back.
I stood frozen in the crowded courtyard with the cold ocean wind on my face, and the truth hit me. I wasn't the only predator on thi
s campus.
Braxton Sterling had been waiting for me.
