CHAPTER ONE: The New House
Ivy Calloway had pictured a lot of things about her mother’s new husband’s house. A gate, maybe. Good taste in furniture, given how the man apparently made his money in “land and timber,” a phrase that had always sounded to Ivy like something out of a period drama. She had not pictured a house that felt, the second she stepped inside it, like it was listening.
“You’ll get used to the quiet,” her mother said, practically vibrating with the specific happiness of a woman who’d spent eight years alone and had finally stopped being afraid to want something again.
“Damon says the house echoes more than it should. Old stone. Big rooms. You’ll love it once you’re settled.”
Ivy did not love it yet. She stood in the entryway of a house that could have swallowed her childhood apartment four times over and felt, absurdly, like an animal that had wandered somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be.
Damon Thorne came down the stairs to meet them, and Ivy understood, in the first three seconds of meeting her new stepfather, why her mother had fallen for him so fast. He had the kind of stillness that made a room feel more solid just by him standing in it, broad-shouldered, silver threading through dark hair at the temples, a voice pitched low and careful, like a man who’d spent a long time learning how to sound harmless.
“Ivy.” He said her name like he’d practiced it, which she found, against her own expectations, sort of endearing. “Elena talks about you constantly. I’m glad you’re finally here.”
“Thanks for having us,” Ivy said, and meant it more than she expected to, until his eyes, a strange, warm amber that seemed to catch the hallway light wrong, too bright, too gold, flicked toward the top of the stairs, and something in his posture went, very briefly, alert.
“Kian,” Damon said, not quite a warning, not quite anything else. “Come meet your new sister.”
Ivy looked up.
The boy descending the staircase moved like he already knew exactly how good he looked doing it. Dark hair, sharp jaw, the kind of easy, lethal smile that belonged on a magazine cover instead of a random Tuesday afternoon. He wore the boredom of someone used to being looked at, and underneath that boredom, for one unguarded half-second as his eyes met hers, something sharpened. Focused. Like a predator noticing, for the first time in a long while, something worth actually looking at.
“Stepsister,” Kian said, testing the word slowly, like it tasted strange in his mouth. “Didn’t realize Dad’s wife had one of those.”
“I contain multitudes,” Ivy said, flat, unimpressed on principle, though her pulse had picked up in a way she resented immediately.
Kian’s mouth curved. “I bet you do.”
“Kian,” Damon said again, sharper this time, and something passed between father and son that Ivy couldn’t read, a warning, maybe, or an old argument neither of them wanted to have in front of company.
Kian’s smile didn’t waver. But his eyes, when they found Ivy’s again, held something that felt less like flirtation and more like recognition. The specific, startled recognition of someone who has just realized the floor beneath them has changed shape.
“Welcome home,” he said, and something about the way he said home made the back of Ivy’s neck prickle, though she couldn’t have said why.
It would be three more days before she understood that her body had known something her mind hadn’t caught up to yet.
