Novels by Ava Cole

CAMILLE"Say that again."Zack's voice had gone somewhere I hadn't heard it go before. Not loud,just quieter,which somehow made it worse.I stood a few feet back, still holding Brian's bath things, watching a muscle move in his jaw like it was doing work his face wasn't ready to explain. Whatever came through that phone wasn't good. I had seen him cold,seen him furious, once, gripping my shoulders hard enough to bruise. But I had never once seen him look like this, like something had reached in and found the one wire that actually mattered to him.What scares a man like that, I thought. I genuinely didn't have a guess."No." Flat and final. "Don't do anything until I get there."He hung up without saying goodbye. Just pulled the phone away from his ear and stood there a second, staring at nothing, like the call was still happening somewhere behind his eyes."Is everything okay?"He blinked, and the second I asked, something shuttered closed on his face. The fear folded itself away so

CAMILLEI woke up with a crick in my neck and the ghost of his hand still warm against mine.It took a second too long to understand none of it had happened.The hallway,the rain against the window. The way he'd said my name like it meant something. All of it dissolved the moment I opened my eyes to the fluorescent hum of the hospital room, my mother asleep in the bed beside me, the plastic chair digging into my spine exactly where it had been digging into it for hours. I'd fallen asleep sometime after midnight, sitting up, and my mind had apparently decided to give me something my actual life hadn't.I sat there for a moment, embarrassed at myself in the particular, private way you're embarrassed by your own dreams, and tried very hard not to examine too closely why my subconscious had chosen him, of all people, to be gentle with me.I hadn't even gotten a ride to the hospital. I'd taken the last of my hidden cab fare and arrived alone, the way I arrived at everything.My mother st

CAMILLEHe didn't ask if I wanted him to drive me,he just drove.I hadn't even made it past the gate before his car pulled alongside me, headlights cutting through the dark, window already rolling down like he'd been waiting for exactly this. I got in without arguing, mostly because my legs had stopped being reliable enough to argue with anyone.Neither of us spoke for the first few minutes. I watched the city blur past the window, streetlights sliding over his hands on the wheel, steady in a way nothing else in my life felt steady right now, and I found myself grateful for the silence in a way I wouldn't have expected from him two days ago."You're doing the thing," he said finally, not looking at me."What thing?""Deciding you're alone in this before anyone's given you a reason to."I almost laughed, except nothing about tonight felt funny. "Maybe I've learned that it's safer.""Maybe." He glanced at me, quick, and it was gone before I could read it properly"Or maybe you've just

CAMILLEI'd assumed, walking into the Smith estate for my first real day, that surviving the interview was the hard part. I was wrong within the first hour.I'd be a live-in maid with Sundays off, which sounded generous until I did the math and realized six days a week inside a house where I'd already been slapped twice meant I'd be spending most of my waking life somewhere that could turn on me without warning.I stood in front of the mirror in the staff quarters that morning longer than I should have, not really looking at myself so much as looking past my own reflection at a memory that liked to surface whenever I was about to do something hard.I'll always be there for you, Camille. We're going to be fine. One big happy family, you'll see.My father used to say that at the dinner table, like a man laying a foundation he had every intention of finishing. We hadn't been rich,but we were comfortable, the kind of family that argued about whose turn it was to do dishes and meant it as

CHAPTER TWOCAMILLE"Stop? Why on earth should he stop?" Mrs. Smith's voice climbed half an octave, the particular pitch of a woman used to winning arguments by volume alone. "She's a thief and thieves get dragged out. I won't stand here and debate the obvious.""Mother." Zack didn't raise his voice to match hers. He never seemed to need to. "You have no evidence. You have a bracelet that turned up in the one bag nobody was watching. That's not proof, that's convenience. Pull the security footage before you ruin someone's morning over a hunch." Zack said.I hadn't meant to say anything. The thought ... .Wait,did he just stand up for me arrived and left my mouth before I'd given it permission to, and by the time I registered what I'd done, four pairs of eyes had already swiveled toward me with the kind of interest reserved for a car accident."Careful," Mrs. Smith said, studying me the way you'd study something you'd stepped in. "Don't mistake my son's caution for sympathy. You'd be

.CAMILLEThe taxi pulled away before I had even finished counting the coins in my palm, and I stood there a moment too long, watching its taillights shrink down the long drive until the gate in front of me was the only thing left to look at.It didn't look like a gate so much as a verdict. The Iron, twice my height, flanked by hedges someone was paid to keep so perfectly square they looked fake. I'd seen the Smith name in headlines for years,new acquisitions, record profits, a wing of the children's hospital with a name tag in front but none of it had prepared me for how it felt to stand outside their actual house holding a piece of paper with my whole life folded into it.Nanny position. Live-in preferred. Experience with children required.I had no experience with children. I only had experience with hospitals, with insurance forms, with the particular silence that falls over a waiting room after a doctor uses the word *aggressive* to describe an illness instead of a person. I fig