Chapter 2 Sibling for Sibling

Knight

I'd read Rain Smith's file eleven times.

I read it a twelfth now, standing at my office window on the sixtieth floor, the city spread out beneath me like a board I owned. Top of her class. A year early. She'd volunteered at an animal center while juggling part-time jobs and school. She'd had two full rides, NYU and a school in Kentucky, and she'd taken the one that put hundreds of miles between her and her own family. A boarding school before that. And not one emergency contact on any form she'd ever signed.

Not one.

That was what threw me the first time I read it. She had a whole family back here in the city, and she'd listed no one. I didn't like surprises, and that one had sat in my gut for days.

She is a Smith, I reminded myself. *That's all she is, and that's what she'll always be.*

It had taken four months to set up. Her internship application had been one of three thousand, and she'd turned hers in late. The second I heard her name had come through, I went down to HR myself, took her file, and told them to close the applications so no one else could be considered. Nobody asked why. Nobody at Cage Global ever asked me why. That was what I paid them for.

I spent those four months watching her the way a predator studies its prey. Where she ate lunch. Which library carrel she always claimed, the one by the window. The twenty-dollar sketches she sold to students on weekends, which could have easily gone for hundreds. I'd expected greed, or vanity, or at least a little of the rot you find in a girl who knows she's clever.

I found isolation instead. A loneliness so obvious it almost made me feel sorry for her, until I reminded myself she deserved it.

It should have made the plan harder. Instead I told myself it would make it better: the harder she pretended to be meek, the more miserable I'd make her.

A contract sat on my desk, two pages long and perfectly legal. I'd written the clause on the second page myself and made it so dull that nobody would read it twice. It would bind her to me for two years. It would make her mine in every way a courtroom could enforce. She'd sign it because she was young and hungry and grateful, and gratitude is the cheapest chain a man can buy.

"Mr. Cage." My secretary's voice drifted through the door. "Miss Smith is here."

I didn't turn around. "Send her in."

I heard her before I saw her, barely. She was that quiet.

I turned.

She was smaller than I'd expected, in a blazer that clearly wasn't hers, the sleeves too long and the fabric worn thin. She held herself very straight. And her eyes were Lily's eyes, wide and dark and far too innocent for everything they'd hidden.

The sight of them hit me in the chest like a fist.

*Lily, laughing at my brother across a crowded room. Lily, tucking her hair behind her ear while Damon looked at her as if she'd hung the stars. Lily, who smiled at me too, and made me think, for one stupid moment, that my brother had chosen well.*

I turned a page on the desk so she wouldn't see my hand close.

"Sit."

She sat. Her gaze drifted to the window, to the glittering sprawl of the city below, and then came back to me, and she kept steady for all but fifteen seconds before she let her eyes drop.

"You'll be at my side from seven in the morning until I say otherwise," I said. "You'll handle my calendar, my calls, and my flight preparations if the need ever arises. You will not be late. You will not make mistakes. And you will not ask me why."

"I understand, sir."

"Do you?"

Something crossed her face, a flicker of the nerves she'd been fighting since she walked in. I watched her swallow it and square her shoulders.

"I'll work harder than anyone you've ever hired," she said.

*I know you will,* I thought. *That's the point.*

I slid the pen across the desk. She read nothing. She just signed her name, neat as a schoolgirl, the signature of someone who'd never been given anything and hadn't learned to read the fine print.

My hand lifted half an inch off the desk, almost snatching the pen out of her fingers to tell her to read it first instead of signing blind.

I pressed my palm flat against the wood and kept it there.

"Welcome to Cage Global, Miss Smith."

"Thank you, Mr. Cage." She smiled, and I could see the hope in her eyes at the thought of a better life, and it almost looked real. "You won't regret this."

"No," I said softly. "I won't."

She left. The door clicked shut behind her, and I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding. I walked back to the window and found her far below, a small figure crossing the lobby, the luckiest girl in the city on the luckiest day of her life.

In my pocket, my fingers closed around a hospital visitor's badge. I'd never been able to throw it away.

Damon, thin and silent behind locked doors. Damon, staring at the wall for hours. Damon, who looked up the last time I visited and asked, in a voice like paper, "Did she come?"

I held my brother's hand and lied. *No. Not yet.* Because the truth would have been worse. Because Lily Smith had taken a boy who loved her with his whole heart and broken him into pieces, and then she'd vanished into the world without so much as a goodbye and never looked back.

She left me with a brother who no longer knew the day of the week, and a house with no one else left in it.

We were orphans. Damon was all I had. And a Smith had taken him.

"Sibling for sibling," I whispered to the glass.

Her sister had destroyed my brother. I'd return the favor, one day at a time, until Rain Smith understood exactly what it meant to lose the only person who'd ever mattered.

Then I went back to my desk, and I began to plan.