1
AURELIA
I’m sketchingthe emergency exit row when he sits down beside me.
The pencil stills in my hand before I can stop it, and I force myself to keep my eyes on the page. Don’t look. Don’t react. Just keep drawing the outline of the window, the curve of the seat, anything that makes me look like a normal person doing normal things.
My heart is trying to claw its way out of my chest.
I’ve been running for two months, sleeping in motels that rent rooms by the hour, jumping every time a door slams or someone looks at me too long.
I dyed my hair black three weeks ago in a gas station bathroom. The contacts that turn my hazel eyes blue irritate the hell out of me, but I wear them anyway because I can’t afford to be recognized. Not when my uncle has people looking for me in every city between here and the Canadian border.
I almost didn’t book this flight to New York. Too risky. Too many Vance connections, too many people who might see through thedisguise. But my mother’s buried there, and if I’m leaving the country for good, I need to say goodbye.
It’s stupid and sentimental. It’s the sort of mistake that gets you caught, but I did it anyway because grief doesn’t care about logic.
And now I’m on this plane in first class, paid for with cash from the stacks of hundred-dollar bills I took when I ran, trying not to hyperventilate while Cassian Rourke settles into the seat next to mine.
I knew what he looked like before today. Two years ago, bored out of my mind during another family dinner where I wasn’t allowed to speak unless spoken to, I hacked into my uncle’s files and spent an entire week memorizing faces. Every enemy the Vance family had collected over five decades. Names, operations, and territory maps. It was research, because knowing who wants us dead might be useful someday.
But Cassian Rourke was different.
I stared at his photo longer than the others. Couldn’t stop tracing the line of his jaw with my eyes, the way his mouth was set in something that wasn’t quite a smile. He was older than me by two and a half decades and dangerous in ways I didn’t fully understand.
But the photo wasn’t enough. I found videos—news footage of him at charity events looking like any other businessman, then older surveillance clips showing someone different. Cassian outside the warehouses at two in the morning, his presence alone making grown men back down. The contrast fascinated me. Monster or man, I couldn’t tell, and that made it worse.
I spent four months obsessed. Started using his face when I touched myself late at night, fantasies about him finding mesomewhere I shouldn’t be and recognizing me as a Vance. It was twisted and reckless, but it felt like rebellion against everything my uncle wanted for me. I even convinced Julian to take me to a Knicks game once because I’d found out Cassian would be there. He never looked my way, never knew I existed, and somehow that made the fantasy stronger.
Then I got into a relationship, and the fantasies stopped, but I never forgot his face.
And now he’s here. Right here.
I’m wearing a mask. It’s pulled up over my nose so only my eyes show. It’s part of the disguise, another layer between me and anyone who might recognize Victor Vance’s runaway niece, but right now it feels like the only thing keeping me from doing something catastrophically stupid.
Like staring at him the way I stared at those photos.
He shifts in his seat, and I catch the movement in my peripheral vision. Broad shoulders filling out a charcoal suit. No tie yet—it’s draped over his knee while he unbuttons his collar, and I hate that I can’t help but look.
The flight attendant stops by, young and polished, her smile bright enough to sell toothpaste. “Can I get you anything before we take off, Mr. Rourke?”
My pencil slips. Just slightly, but enough that the line I’m drawing veers off course and ruins the sketch.
He orders whiskey. His voice is exactly what I remember from the videos I found of him—deep, Irish accent softened but not erased.
The flight attendant turns to me. “And for you, miss?”
“Water’s fine.” My voice comes out steadier than I feel, muffled slightly by the mask.
She leaves, and I’m alone with him.
Well. Alone in the only way you can be when you’re on a plane surrounded by other passengers, but it feels intimate anyway. The armrest between us might as well be a live wire.
I focus on my sketchbook, flipping to a new page and starting over. My hands are shaking just enough to make the lines uneven, but I keep going because stopping means I’ll have nothing to do except sit here and try not to combust.
“You draw.”
I glance up.
