Chapter One
945 Words
The knock came while Naya was knitting.
She wasn't expecting anyone. She dropped the yellow yarn, walked to the door and opened it but there was nobody there. Just a cream envelope on the mat with Voss Industries Legal Division printed across the top.
Her heart skipped a beat but it wasn't clear whether it was joy or fear…her brother has always been a troublemaker and a letter from his company could only mean two things, either he was in trouble or he got a promotion but the latter could have been sent to his mail directly, so why?
She picked it up fidgeting and tore it open standing right there in the doorway.
Four paragraphs. She read them once, then again. Her brother Marcus had embezzled money, the letter called it misappropriated funds but Naya was not confused about what that meant. A number followed that made her stomach drop. And at the bottom, there was one instruction: present herself at Voss Industries headquarters within forty-eight hours or the matter would be handed to criminal authorities.
She stood there a moment longer than she needed to, her feet refusing to move.
Marcus had been unreachable for eleven days. She had called seven times. Texted fourteen. Told herself he was going through something, that the silence meant nothing, that her brother would not do something this stupid and this cruel and then simply disappear and leave her standing in it. She had told herself all of that very convincingly for eleven days.
The letter wasn't the tiniest bit pleasant as her hope that it was for a good cause.
She folded it back into the envelope, went inside, and sat down at the kitchen table. Not because she needed to think, she already knew what she was going to do. She was going to go. She was going to walk into that building and sit across from whoever sent this letter and find a way to hold herself together long enough to fix what her brother had broken. Because that was what she did. That was what she had always done.
She pulled out her phone and looked up Voss Industries.
What came back made her put the phone face-down on the table.
Damian Voss. Thirty-two years old. CEO of a conglomerate spanning real estate, private equity and luxury hospitality. Worth more money than Naya could make sense of. Never lost a legal dispute. Never lost anything, by the look of it — every article, every profile, every photograph of him in a room full of powerful people carried the same energy: a man who did not negotiate, he simply decided, and the world arranged itself accordingly.
She turned her phone back over and looked at his face for a moment.
Cold. Precise. The kind of handsome that didn't soften him at all.
She put the phone down again and finished the row she'd been knitting before the knock came. Then she called Ryan.
He picked up on the second ring the way he always did, like he'd been waiting.
"Hey. You good?"
She almost said yes. It was her first instinct, always — compress it, manage it, don't make it someone else's weight. But Ryan had known her since they were twelve years old and she was tired, suddenly, of compressing things.
"No," she said. "I don't think I am."
He was at her door twenty minutes later with food she hadn't asked for and the particular quiet that was his way of saying I'm here and I'm not going anywhere. She showed him the letter. He read it twice, the same way she had, and she watched his jaw tighten.
"Marcus," he said. Not a question. Just the name, landing the way it deserved to.
"Marcus," she confirmed.
Ryan set the letter down on the table carefully, like it might do more damage if handled wrong. "What are you going to do?"
"Go," she said. "What else is there?"
He looked at her the way he sometimes did — like there was something sitting behind his eyes that he was choosing, deliberately and with effort, not to say. Then he nodded. "I'll come with you."
"You can't come with me."
"I know." He said it simply. "I'll take you there, then."
She didn't argue. She never won arguments with Ryan, not because he was forceful but because he was steady in a way that made resistance feel pointless. He stayed that evening, the two of them eating at her small kitchen table while the letter sat between them like a third person neither of them wanted to address directly. He didn't try to fix it. He didn't tell her it would be fine. He just stayed, and for Naya, that night, staying was the only thing that mattered.
After he left she lay in bed and stared at the ceiling.
Forty-eight hours.
She thought about her mother, who was on a double shift and didn't know any of this yet and would not know until Naya had figured out how to say it without making her afraid. She thought about Marcus — where he was, whether he was safe, whether he had thought about her at all when he made the choices that had brought this envelope to her door. She thought about Damian Voss and his cold, precise face in those photographs and the fact that a man like that did not send legal notices because he wanted a conversation.
He sent them because he had already decided the outcome.
She closed her eyes.
You've handled everything else, she told herself in the dark. You'll handle this too.
She almost believed it.
- Writer
