Chapter 2

Aislinn's POV

I hurried to the elevator lobby, my heart hammering wildly against my ribs.

The brushed-steel doors slid open on three businessmen in suits.

None of them was the man from the hallway.

I sagged against the mirrored wall of the lobby and stared at my reflection.

My mascara had smudged into a dark halo around my eyes, and my hair still reeked of the club's stale secondhand smoke.

The woman in the mirror was a wreck—pitiful, hollow, worn through.

Eight years ago, when Brantley Keith looked at me, it was with a burning, total attention, as if I were the only thing in the universe that mattered.

He was the son of my family's head gardener at the Pasadena estate.

He always wore faded flannel shirts, yet he placed in the top one percent of every math competition he entered.

He was quiet, and he was brilliant.

Back then I used to get my calculus homework wrong on purpose, just so my mother would hire him to tutor me in the garden gazebo.

I would sit there for hours, quietly watching his long fingers turn the pencil, listening to that low, steady voice walk me through formulas I already knew by heart.

Then my mother noticed the way we looked at each other by the rose bushes.

She summoned me to the grand dining room and warned me, cold and clear, that a Baxter daughter could never entangle herself with the hired help.

She said that giving a poor boy false hope would only ruin his future.

On the eve of my eighteenth birthday, Brantley and his father vanished from the estate cottage overnight.

Their phone lines were disconnected, and the little brick house was emptied down to the walls, without a trace.

When I demanded the truth through my tears, my father froze my trust fund and confiscated my phone for three weeks.

He told me coldly that people like Brantley knew exactly what they were worth to people like us; the moment they faced reality, they'd run faster than anyone.

That unfinished disappearance turned to poison in my veins, gnawing at my heart for the eight years that followed.

Three years after Brantley left, I ran into Chaim Barrett at an amateur motocross track in San Diego.

Chaim had the exact same sharp jawline, the exact same deep brown eyes—and hanging on his chest, the exact same black tungsten ring.

The first time he ever spoke to me, he sneered at my floral dress and said that preppy, polished heiresses did nothing for him.

To fit into his world, I threw out every dress I owned and armored myself in heavy, clumsy riding leathers.

For five whole years, I forced myself onto dirt bikes, wakeboards, and double-black-diamond ski runs, enduring crash after terrifying crash, all for one more look at that familiar face.

At most of his races I hid behind the stands, retching with fear while his entourage howled with laughter.

But when he tossed me a spare bottle of water after every qualifier, I let myself believe it was all worth it.

My phone vibrated violently in my clutch, dragging me out of the swamp of memory.

It was Chaim calling.

I swiped to answer, and before I could speak, Felicity's giggling came through the line.

"Aislinn, Chaim says you'd better stay put in the valet zone," Felicity slurred, tipsy. "He doesn't want you passing out on the street and embarrassing him."

Then Chaim's distracted voice came close to the receiver.

"Get in the black sedan and go home, Aislinn," Chaim ordered. "Felicity wants another round of tequila, and I'm staying."

He hung up without waiting for an answer.

I pushed through the revolving doors into the cold night air.

The valet looked down at my legs, his eyes going wide with alarm.

"Miss, you're bleeding," the valet said, pointing at my right shin.

A dark red streak ran down my leg, staining the laces of my beige heels.

When I'd hit that table, the pain had numbed me so completely that I never felt the skin break.

My phone chimed—a new message in the group chat.

Felicity had just posted a photo—under the neon lights, Chaim's arm was looped around her waist, both of them raising their shot glasses high.

The caption read: "For my real adrenaline partner."

I didn't type a reply. I didn't—like the old me always did—snap a photo of my bloodied shin and send it back, pathetically fishing for a scrap of Chaim's pity.

I pressed the screen dark and got into a taxi.

Half an hour later, I turned the key and pushed open the door of our townhouse.

My mother was sitting in the living room, holding a cup of chamomile tea.

The moment she saw my bloodied shoes, she set down the cup and fetched the first-aid kit from the bathroom.

She knelt on the hardwood floor and pressed antiseptic wipes gently against my shin, saying nothing about Chaim at all.

"Stop throwing yourself at people who don't care about you, Aislinn," my mother sighed.

I leaned my head back against the sofa and stared blankly at the ceiling.

"None of it matters anymore, Mom," I whispered.

My mother's hands paused mid-wrap, and she looked up at me.

"Someone came by the house this afternoon," she said quietly. "He was looking for you."

I looked down at her.

"Who?"

"Brantley Keith," my mother said, biting her lip. "He came back from New York. He built a multibillion-dollar venture capital firm, and yesterday morning he bought out your father's core logistics partner—entirely in cash."

My breath caught in my throat. The boy I had waited eight years for hadn't forgotten me.

My mother reached into her cardigan pocket and drew out a heavy black card, embossed with silver foil.

"He left this for you," she said, her voice trembling faintly. "Aislinn, there are things about what happened eight years ago... things you were never told."

I snatched the card with shaking fingers.

A private number was printed along the bottom.

I typed the number into my messaging app, and had barely sent a single line:

"Is that really you?"

The next second, a message appeared on my screen.

"I'm on the corner of your street, Aislinn. I came back."