Loving the Enemy's Son

The night Sophia Reyes decided to run, the sky was already crying for her. Rain hammered against the glass walls of the Bellamy Art Gallery, blurring the city lights into golden streaks. Inside, everything was too bright, too loud, too full of people who smiled at her like knives. Her mother's voice sliced through the noise from somewhere near the champagne table — "Sophia, come meet the Kensington investors; Sophia, stand up straight; Sophia, don't embarrass this family" — and for the hundredth time that week, she wanted to disappear. So she did. She slipped through a side door meant for caterers, down a narrow hallway that smelled of candle wax and rain-damp concrete, and out into the storm without a coat. The cold hit her like relief. She laughed — actually laughed, the first real sound she'd made all night — and tipped her face up to the rain until her mascara ran and she stopped caring. That was when she saw him. He was standing under the gallery's side awning, jacket off, holding it out over a stray cat that had wedged itself against the wall to escape the storm. He wasn't looking at Sophia. He wasn't looking at anyone. He was crouched low, murmuring something soft, useless, and kind to an animal that would never understand him, and something about the sight cracked Sophia open in a way twenty years of her mother's ambitions never had. "You're going to ruin a very expensive jacket," she said. He looked up. Rain had plastered his dark hair to his forehead, and his eyes—she would spend months trying to describe the color of those eyes to herself and never quite manage it—found her as if he had been expecting someone to interrupt him all along. "It's just a jacket," he said. "She's just a cat. Seemed like an easy trade." "Optimist, "Realist. Cats don't ask for anything else once they're warm." He stood, and the cat, apparently satisfied, vanished into the dark. "You're soaked." "So are you." "I did it on purpose." A small, crooked smile appeared. "What's your excuse?" Sophia should have said something clever. Instead, she replied, "I needed air that didn't carry my mother's opinions." He laughed—a genuine laugh, surprised out of him—and for a moment, the rain, the party, and the whole suffocating weight of being a Reyes fell away. She was just a girl talking to a stranger who smelled like cedar and rain and didn't seem to want anything from her at all. "Ethan," he said, offering his hand. "Sophia." She shook it. His hand was warm despite the storm. Neither of them mentioned their last names. Neither thought to ask. They talked for an hour under that awning while the party glittered on without them—about nothing important, about everything that mattered. He told her he hated galas and only came because his father insisted appearances mattered more than truth. She told him she was tired of being a name before she was a person. Neither mentioned what those names were. It didn't occur to either of them that it should. When the rain finally thinned to mist, he walked her to the corner where her driver waited, and he didn’t ask for her number. He didn’t need to. He simply said, "I come here most Tuesdays." "There's a bookstore two blocks down that stays open past midnight. I'll be there." "Maybe I'll be there too," Sophia said, meaning it more than she had meant anything in months. She didn't tell her mother where she had been. She didn't tell her brother, Marcus, who ran security for the family like their father used to before his heart gave out under the weight of a decade-old scandal nobody would explain to her. She certainly didn't tell her Aunt Delia, who watched the Kensington family—sorry, the Wade family, Sophia corrected herself; she'd caught the name once in passing from an assistant—with the kind of hatred that had outlived whatever caused it. Because Sophia Reyes did not yet know that the boy who had knelt in the rain for a stray cat was Ethan Wade. She did not know that her mother's fortune and his father's fortune had been carved from the same wreckage twenty years ago—a shipping conglomerate that collapsed overnight, taking with it three hundred jobs, two reputations, and, some said, a man's life. She did not know that the Reyes and Wade names had not been spoken together in polite company for two decades without someone's jaw tightening. She only knew that on Tuesday, she wanted to see him again. Three miles away, in a penthouse office overlooking the same rain-soaked skyline, Ethan Wade stood at the window with a glass of scotch he hadn't touched, watching the storm the same way Sophia had—as if it were the only honest thing in the city. His father's voice came from behind him, clipped and cold. "Where were you tonight? The Bellamy opening was a chance to shake hands with people who matter." "I shook enough hands," Ethan replied. Richard Wade set down a folder on his desk with a precision that made the room feel smaller. "The Reyes woman was there. Elena. Twenty years, and she still can't look me in the eye at a party without her hands shaking." He said it with something that might have been satisfaction. "Good. Let her shake." Ethan turned. "Do you ever get tired of it? The war?" "It's not a war, son. It's a debt. They took something from this family, and I intend for them to spend the rest of their lives paying for it." Richard's eyes were flat and unreadable, the eyes of a man who had rehearsed his own righteousness so many times that he no longer questioned it. "Someday you'll understand why I need you to hate them the way I do." Ethan didn't answer. He was thinking of a girl in the rain who had laughed like she’d never been allowed to before, whose smile had made the whole ugly, complicated city feel, for one hour, simple. He didn't know her last name. He didn't know that the storm outside was nothing compared to the one already gathering—the one that would come for both of them the moment either family learned who the other had fallen for. But some part of him, some quiet unspoken instinct, already understood one thing with total certainty: Tuesday could not come fast enough.