The enchanted flowers in the oak trees had dimmed to a soft, sleepy glow, their colors settling into muted golds and lavenders as the magic wound itself down for the night. Staff moved between tables, clearing crystal and linen. Ada had finally been steered away from all remaining breakable objects and was sitting cross-legged on a stone bench at the far edge of the terrace, showing something on her phone to a bemused-looking Caro waiter who was clearly too polite to walk away and too fascinated to want to.
The night was quiet.
Alexei closed the file.
He did not need it anymore. He had not needed it for a long time. Every word, every number, every detail was already inside him, as fixed and permanent as the memories of Atlantis itself.
He thought of the photograph. The dark hair tucked behind one ear. The brown eyes that held intelligence and bruising in equal measure. The smile that asked for nothing and expected even less.
And he thought of what he was about to do to that smile.
Because Alexei was many things—patient, strategic, willing to play a long game that most people couldn’t even perceive—but he was not gentle. He had never been gentle. Gentleness required a kind of recklessness with one’s own power that he could not afford, not when his power was the kind that could break things without meaning to.
He was going to enter this girl’s life. He was going to take the quiet existence she had built for herself in the aftermath of aboy’s cowardice, and he was going to dismantle it. Not out of cruelty. Out of certainty.
She was his.
She had been his since the moment a number appeared on a screen and every rational argument he had ever made for solitude lost its weight.
Whether she knew it yet or not.
Whether she wanted it or not.
Alexei Lykaios rose from the table and walked into the darkness of the Celestini estate’s gardens.
But if anyone had thought to look closely—truly closely, past the stillness and the aristocratic mask he wore like a second skin—they might have noticed something in his pale eyes that had not been there before.
Something that looked, against all reason and all probability, like hunger.
Not the predatory kind.
The kind that ached.
CHAPTER ONE
THE THING ABOUT STARTINGover is that nobody tells you how boring it is.
Like, seriously.
Books and movies make it look like this big dramatic moment. You cry in the rain, you cut your hair, you move to a new city, and then a montage plays where you’re jogging at sunrise and laughing with new friends and ordering coffee with the confidence of someone who has never been dumped by text message.
Nobody mentions the part where you’re sitting on the edge of your bed at 6:47 a.m., fully dressed for work fifteen minutes early because you’ve been awake since five and there’s only so many times you can rearrange the books on your windowsill before it starts to feel clinical.
I look at the books now. They’re organized by color, which I know is objectively unhinged, but I like the way it looks. A little rainbow of secondhand paperbacks, their spines cracked and faded, most of them romances. Because I’m apparently the kind of person who still reads love stories even after her own turned out to be fiction.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand. A text from my mom.
Joni: Good morning sweetheart! Remember to eat breakfast! I read that skipping meals affects your brain chemistry and I don’t want your brain chemistry affected!
This is followed by three sun emojis, a flexing arm, and what I think is supposed to be a bowl of cereal but looks more like a hat.
I type back:Already ate! Love you!
It’s a lie, but it can’t be helped. Joni Morgan worries enough for the both of us and then some, and she’s three hours away in a house whose roof I’m still secretly paying to fix, so the least I can do is not add “my daughter skips breakfast” to her list of concerns.
I grab my bag, check my reflection one last time, hair down, minimal makeup, the outfit of a woman who takes this job seriously but also got dressed in four minutes, and head out.
The morning is cold, the kind that bites at your ears and makes your eyes water, and I walk quickly through the three blocks between my apartment and the shuttle stop. Lykaios Holdings runs a fleet of sleek black shuttles that pick up employees from designated points around the city, which I thought was incredibly generous when I first started and now realize is probably just because the headquarters is located halfway up a mountain and nobody wants to deal with the parking.
