The leather seat of my town car felt like an interrogation chair.
Outside, the gray Seattle drizzle washed over the windshield in blurred, melancholy streaks, matching the cold, hollow fury churning inside my chest. It had been fourteen hours since Chloe had fled the Grand Vista penthouse. Fourteen hours of radio silence, locked phones, and a suffocating, blinding rage directed entirely at myself.
I sat in the dark interior of the car, staring at my reflection in the glass, and loathed every single thing looking back at me.
Weak.
That’s what I was. For all my corporate ruthlessness, for all the boardrooms I had conquered and empires I had engineered, I was still fundamentally chained to a ghost. Elena. My first love. The girl who had held my hand when I was just an ambitious archi
