DEVOURED BY TWO

Chapter 5:The beginning of Everything

woke up to my phone screaming at me.

Not my alarm. Not my mother. My phone — vibrating so aggressively against my nightstand that it had shuffled itself halfway off the edge, buzzing with the unhinged energy of something that needed to be seen right now.

I grabbed it blindly, face still half buried in my pillow, one eye open, fully prepared to be annoyed.

The email subject line stopped me cold.

Herden Sterling International — Offer of Employment

I sat up.

Both eyes are open now.

Heart doing something complicated and immediate in my chest as I stared at the screen, at those five words, at the little Herden Sterling logo sitting neat and official at the top of the email like it hadn't just rearranged my entire morning.

I read it once.

Twice.

Three times, because my brain was not yet fully awake and it needed to be certain it was not manufacturing things.

Dear Ms. Selene,

We are pleased to extend an offer of employment for the position of Senior Project Coordinator at Herden Sterling International. Following your interview, it is our unanimous assessment that you are an exceptional fit for our team...

Unanimous.

I read that word four separate times.

...The attached package outlines your compensation, benefits, and start date. We look forward to welcoming you to the Herden Sterling family and hope you will confirm your acceptance at your earliest convenience.

Yours sincerely,

Marcus Webb — Head of Human Resources

Herden Sterling International

I stared at the screen.

Then I screamed into my pillow.

Not a small, dignified sound. A full, unrestrained, completely unladylike scream of pure, undiluted joy muffled into Egyptian cotton, my feet kicking against the mattress like a child on Christmas morning, because no one was watching and I had earned this and I was going to celebrate it exactly as messily as I wanted to.

I sat back up.

Read it again.

Screamed again, quieter this time, more of a sustained high-pitched noise that my mother would absolutely come to investigate if she were home.

Then I called Stella.

It rang once.

"If you are calling me before nine on a Saturday," Stella's voice came through, low and sleep-roughened and entirely unamused, "someone had better be dying or engaged or—"

"I got the job."

Silence.

"Stella."

"I heard you." A pause. Then — rustling, movement, the sound of someone sitting up very quickly. "Wait. The job? The Herden Sterling job?"

"The Herden Sterling job."

"SELENE."

I held the phone away from my ear.

"SELENE OH MY GOD—"

"I know—"

"HERDEN STERLING? As in THE Herden Sterling? As in the company that is literally on the cover of Forbes every other month? As in Caspian and Zion Herden Sterling—"

"The same—"

"SELENE I TOLD YOU. I TOLD YOU THAT YOU WERE GOING TO GET IT. DID I NOT TELL YOU—"

"You told me—"

"I told you EXACTLY that, I said Selene you are walking in there and walking out with that job and you said, ' Oh Stella I don't know and I said—"

"Stella—"

"We need to celebrate." Her voice shifted, snapping from elated to decisive with the efficiency of a woman who had built an entire career on knowing exactly what the next move was. "Tonight. We are going out."

I pulled my knees to my chest. "Stella—"

"Don't." I could hear her already moving, already planning, the soft sounds of her apartment coming alive around her. "Don't Stella me. Don't give me the I'm tired or the I have things to do or the I'm not really a going out kind of person—"

"I'm not really a going-out kind of person."

"You just got a job at one of the most powerful companies in New York City, Selene. You interviewed with Caspian Sterling — the man who makes venture capitalists nervous — and you walked out with an offer letter. You are absolutely, one hundred percent going out tonight."

"I was thinking more of a quiet dinner—"

"I am thinking Éclat."

I blinked. "The club?"

"The club."

"Stella, Éclat has a three-month waitlist—"

"For other people," she said, with the serene confidence of someone for whom velvet ropes had not been an obstacle since approximately her twenty-second birthday. "Not for me."

I opened my mouth.

"Selene." Her voice softened, just slightly, the way it did when she was being genuine underneath all the glamour. "You never do anything for yourself. You work and you stress and you plan and you take care of everyone else and you never just — live. One night. That is all I am asking. One night where you let yourself be celebrated. You deserve it, babe. You really, genuinely deserve it."

I looked at my phone. The email is still open on my screen. At the words, the unanimous assessment sat there like a small, quiet miracle.

I thought about the grey blazer and the conference room and two men with gold eyes who had looked at me like—

"One night," I said.

Stella made a sound that could only be described as victorious.

"Wear nothing," she said. "I'm bringing the dress."

She arrived at six with a garment bag, a makeup case the size of a small suitcase, a bottle of champagne she opened before she was fully through the door, and the specific energy of a woman who had been waiting for an occasion worthy of her talents.

Stella Voss.

My best friend since the seventh grade, when she had sat beside me in art class and informed me that my color choices were bold and interesting and that she respected that, and I had been too surprised by the compliment to do anything except become her friend immediately. We had grown up side by side and then grown in entirely different directions — me into project management and quiet apartments and a life I built carefully, her into the pages of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar and the front rows of fashion weeks across three continents.

She was, by any reasonable measure, extraordinarily beautiful.

Tonight she had arrived in a cobalt blue gown that appeared to have been poured onto her body by someone who understood physics very well and had decided to have opinions about it. It was silk — deep, rich, ocean blue — cut to the very upper edge of what could be described as a neckline, falling in a clean column that hugged every line of her tall, lean frame before splitting at the thigh into a slit that revealed legs that genuinely went on forever. Long, toned, golden-brown, and endless, her heels made them longer still. Her natural hair was pulled back into a sleek, sculptural updo that showed off her jaw, her neck, the sharp elegant lines of a face that had graced magazine covers and probably caused several minor traffic incidents. Diamond drops at her ears. A single bracelet. The kind of woman who knew that she was the accessory.

She looked at me standing in my robe and made a sound of pure creative determination.

"Sit down," she said. "Don't touch your hair. Don't touch your face. Don't touch anything. Just sit."

"Good evening to you too—"

"Champagne first, talking later." She pressed a glass into my hand, unzipped the garment bag, and pulled out the dress.

I looked at it.

"Stella."

"Don't."

"That is—" I searched for the word. "That is very red."

"It is exactly red," she said, holding it up with the reverence of someone presenting a masterpiece. "It is the specific shade of red that makes people forget what they were saying mid-sentence. Put it on."

The dress was backless.

I discovered this when I put it on and felt the entire back of my body meet open air from the base of my neck to the very lowest point of my spine. The front was structured — a deep V that was somehow both dramatic and tasteful, the scarlet fabric fitted through the bodice in a way that held everything exactly as it was supposed to be held, supportive and precise and perfectly engineered. The skirt fell from the hip in a sweep of layered silk-chiffon that moved with every breath, every shift of weight, catching the light and throwing it back in sparks of deep ruby and gold. It was floor length in the back, split to mid-thigh on the left side, the opening revealing the full length of my leg with every step.

I stood in front of Stella's full-length mirror and tried to process what I was looking at.

"Stella."

"I know," she said, from somewhere behind me, adjusting something at the back.

"This dress—"

"I know."

"My—" I gestured vaguely at the mirror, at the way the fabric curved over my chest, at the impossible narrowing of my waist, at the hips that flared below it into a fullness that the fitted skirt wrapped around and then simply — celebrated, without apology, without restraint.

"I know," Stella said again, with the deep satisfaction of an artist who had made the right choice. She stepped back and looked at me with her head tilted and her arms folded and the expression of someone who had just put a painting in the right frame. "Selene. Look at you."

I looked.

The dress gripped my waist like it had been made for it — which, knowing Stella, it might have been, or at least altered to be. It nipped in and then released into the full, heavy curve of my hips, the fabric pulling taut across them in a way that was somewhere between breathtaking and dangerous. My waist looked impossibly small against the swell of them. The split in the skirt shifted with every movement, revealing the round, high curve of my hip and the full length of my thigh, and the bodice — the bodice held my chest the way expensive architecture held weight, with intention and precision and an appreciation for the extraordinary.

I looked like something out of a painting.

I looked like something men wrote things about.

I looked, honestly, like the best version of myself I had ever seen in a mirror, and I didn't entirely know what to do with that.

"Your hair," Stella said, and stepped forward.

She took it down herself — unpinning it carefully, running her fingers through it until it fell, all of it, the full chestnut weight of it cascading down my bare back in loose, heavy waves that brushed my waist and curled slightly at the ends. Against the open back of the dress, against the warm brown of my skin, it was — it was something. It moved when I moved,