Buried Vows

Chapter One: Hello, Aveline

Wren’s Pov

"Hello, Aveline. I've been looking for you for a very long time."

I heard those words on an ordinary Tuesday, four hundred and twelve steps from my apartment, from a man I hadn't seen in five years and had spent every one of those years praying I never would again.

I want to back up. I want to explain how I got there, because a woman doesn't just get called by a dead name on a street corner without a story behind it, and mine started that morning the way it always does, counting steps, because counting is what you do when you've built a person out of nothing and can't afford to let her come apart at the seams.

I clocked him first outside the coffee shop across from my office. Grey jacket. No coffee. The particular stillness of a man who isn't waiting for a bus, he's waiting for me. I didn't look twice. Rule number one: you never look twice. I kept walking.

By the time I badged into the lobby of Kade Holdings, I'd almost talked myself out of it. Almost. My hands weren't steady when I did it.

"Boss wants the Meridian file by nine," Carlos said from the front desk, not looking up. "Said it like it's your fault it isn't there already."

"It's on his desk."

"Then he wants it on his desk harder."

That's Damian Kade, secondhand, even through a bored security guard. I've worked for him eight months. I've spoken to him directly eleven times, I keep count of that too, old habit and in eight months I have learned exactly one thing about him for certain: he notices everything, and he shows almost none of it.

I took the elevator to fourteen, where the light is too white and the plants are real but trimmed into looking fake, and I sat down at my desk by the window, and that's when I saw him again. Same grey jacket. Same stillness. Standing on the sidewalk fourteen floors down, looking straight up at my window like he already knew exactly which one was mine.

"You okay?" Priya dropped into the chair across from me with the thud of a woman who'd already decided the answer didn't matter. "You've got your face on."

"What face?"

"The one where you're doing math in your head."

I made myself laugh. I made myself drink the coffee. Five years of practice turning panic into performance, and the muscle memory doesn't fail even now, even with my pulse doing something ugly under my ribs. When I looked down again, the sidewalk was empty.

I told myself that was the end of it.

It wasn't. At eleven forty I looked up from the printer and found Damian Kade watching me through his office glass not glancing, watching, the way you watch something you're trying to place. One second too long. Then he turned back to his desk like it had never happened, and I stood there with printer paper going cold in my hands, telling myself it was nothing.

I have gotten extremely good at telling myself that.

By six the fourteenth floor had emptied down to Priya, still fighting a spreadsheet three desks over, and me. I took the stairs instead of the elevator, twelve flights, no reason except my body needed the motion, needed something to do with the static building in my chest since that morning.

The lobby was ordinary. Cabs. A man walking a dog. The coffee shop across the street pulling its chairs in for the night. No grey jacket. I let a breath out I hadn't noticed holding, and started the walk home, and almost made it three blocks before I understood why the quiet felt wrong.

Footsteps behind me. Not rushed, matching, the rhythm of someone who'd adjusted their pace to mine and didn't much care if I noticed. I didn't turn around. Rule number one.

I sped up. The footsteps sped up.

At the corner of Elm and Ninth I broke my own rule, one quick glance over my shoulder, just enough to catch a shape under the streetlight and the breath went straight out of my lungs and didn't come back.

Grey jacket. Same stillness, even in motion. A face I hadn't seen in five years, a face I'd buried at the bottom of a river along with a girl named Aveline Cross, standing half a block behind me on an ordinary Tuesday, three thousand miles from the only life it had any right to remember.

He smiled when our eyes met. Small. Terrible. Pleased with himself.

"Hello, Aveline," he said. "I've been looking for you for a very long time."

I ran. I didn't think about it, didn't plan it, just ran, cutting down Elm toward the avenue where there'd be people, lights, witnesses and I'd made it maybe forty feet when a sound behind me split the whole street open.

An engine. Not a car, something lower, meaner, a growl that came from somewhere behind Viktor and got louder fast, headlight cutting across the wet asphalt like a blade. I didn't stop to look. I heard Viktor swear, heard him break stride, and I kept running until the sound of the engine and the sound of his footsteps both fell away behind me at once, and I didn't understand why until I was four blocks gone and gasping against a mailbox, replaying it.

Someone had come up that street fast enough, close enough, to make a man like Viktor Braun think twice about finishing what he'd started.

I didn't see a face. I didn't see a plate. I saw a black bike, low and heavy, and a rider in a jacket I couldn't place in the dark and stitched across the back of it, catching the streetlight for exactly one second before the bike turned the corner and was gone, a patch I'd never seen before and would spend the rest of that night unable to stop thinking about.

Two words, stitched in white thread on black leather.

ASHEN KINGS.