Novels by Reyna Sterling

The eviction notice was taped to the door at eye level, so Ivy would not miss it. As if she could miss it. As if the last four months had not already told her this was coming, one unanswered email at a time. She peeled it off carefully, like the paper itself might still change its mind, and let herself into the apartment she was no longer allowed to call hers past the end of the week. Boxes everywhere. Half her life folded into cardboard, the other half still hanging in the closet because some part of her had refused to believe it would actually come to this. Her phone rang while she was wrapping her mother's old plates in newspaper. Unknown number. Chicago area code. She almost let it go to voicemail. She answered because rent did not pay itself and neither did pride. "Is this Ivy Reyes?" "Speaking." "My name is Priya Malhotra. I'm calling from Cross Industries. I know this is unexpected, but I'm hoping you have a few minutes." Ivy set the plate down. "I don't work for Cros

Ivy did not remember the walk back to her apartment. One moment she was standing in an elevator forty floors above the city, Damien Cross's handshake still warm on her palm, and the next she was sitting on a box marked KITCHEN in her own handwriting, staring at nothing, wondering what exactly she had just agreed to. She had said yes. Not officially, nothing was signed, but she had shaken his hand, and in her family that had always meant something. Her father used to say a handshake was a contract with better manners, the kind no lawyer could argue you out of later, because you had already given the only thing that mattered, your word, in front of another person's eyes. Her father. She almost laughed, alone in the half packed apartment, at the thought of what Manuel Reyes would say if he could see his daughter agreeing to marry a stranger for money before dinner had even settled in her stomach. He would not shout. He never shouted, not once in twenty two years, not even the week e

Damien was standing when she walked in this time, not sitting behind the desk like a man waiting to be impressed. He had traded the jacket from their first meeting for shirtsleeves, and something about that small shift unsettled her more than his usual armor would have. It was harder to distrust a man who looked like he had rolled up his sleeves for an actual conversation instead of a performance. "Priya said you had a list," he said. "I do." "I'm listening." Ivy set her bag down and did not sit either, which felt important, some instinct telling her this conversation needed to happen at eye level, not across a desk built to remind people who was in charge of the room. She had spent enough of her career watching men use furniture as leverage to recognize the trick when she saw it, and she was not walking into that particular room twice. "Yesterday I said yes because I was tired and scared and you offered me a way to stop being both of those things for a while," she said. "That's

Damien kept his word about the extra day. Ivy spent it exactly the way she had told him she would, not agonizing, not looking for reasons to back out, just living inside the decision long enough to be sure it was actually hers. She finished packing the boxes she had left half done. She walked past her old firm's building out of habit and did not go in. By the time the sun came up the next morning, the strange calm she had woken up with the day before had settled into something closer to certainty, the kind that did not need to announce itself anymore. Priya picked her up at nine, on time to the minute, and did not ask how she had spent the day, which Ivy took as its own quiet form of respect. The lawyer's office smelled like new carpet and old money. Ivy sat across a conference table wide enough to land a plane on, a stack of paper in front of her thick enough to double as a doorstop, and tried to look like this was a normal Tuesday, instead of the day she signed away six months o

Her first night in the Cross residence passed quieter than she expected.She had unpacked what she could reach without waking the rest of the house, hung the one good blazer in a closet three times the size of her old bedroom, and left the voicemail from Meridian Financial Recovery unlistened to on a phone she finally set face down on the nightstand and left there, a small act of mercy toward herself after a day that had already asked enough of her. Somewhere below her, she had heard Damien's voice on a call long after midnight, low and even, the sound of a man who did not know how to stop working even in his own home. She had fallen asleep to it anyway, oddly comforted by the fact that someone else in the house was also still awake, still carrying something heavy into the night.She woke up in a room that was not hers, in a bed that was too soft, in a house that smelled like coffee she had not made.For a moment she forgot where she was. Then she remembered the blue ink, the exit cla

The dress Priya sent over was the color of red wine, cut simple enough to look expensive rather than desperate for attention, and Ivy stood in front of the mirror deciding whether she looked like a fiancée or a woman about to walk into a courtroom.Both, she decided. Probably both was the point.She turned once, watching the fabric move, and thought, not for the first time since moving into this house, how strange it was to own nothing in this closet and still feel more armored in it than she ever had in clothes that were actually hers. Priya had chosen well. Nothing about the dress announced itself. It simply made a case, quietly, the way a well drawn blueprint made a case before a single word of the pitch was spoken.Damien knocked once and let himself into the hallway outside her door, already in a black suit that fit like it had been born on him rather than tailored to him.He looked at her for a beat longer than necessary."You'll do," he said."High praise.""From me, it is."Sh