Amira

The rope cut into Seraphina Kade's wrists until she couldn't feel her hands.

Rain hammered the broken windows of the old warehouse, and the single bulb above her swung on its cord, throwing shadows that moved like something alive. Her dress, the pale blue one she had worn to what was supposed to be a quiet dinner, was torn at the shoulder and soaked through. Blood dripped from a cut above her eyebrow, warm against the cold water running down her face.

She blinked and the world sharpened into focus. Concrete floor. Metal chair. And Julian, standing three feet away with his hands in his pockets, looking at her the way a man looks at a spreadsheet.

"You're awake," he said. "Good. I'd hate for you to miss this."

"Julian." Her voice cracked. "Julian, what is this? Where are we? Where's my father?"

Something in his face changed. Not concern. Amusement.

"Your father," he said slowly, "is dead."

The words didn't make sense at first. She heard them the way she might hear a foreign language, syllables without meaning. Then they landed, all at once, like the floor dropping out from under her.

"No." She pulled against the ropes. Pain flared through her shoulders. "No, you're lying. I saw him this morning. He was fine, he was fine, Julian, tell me you're lying."

"He had a heart attack two hours ago." Julian crouched in front of her so their eyes were level. "Convenient, isn't it? A man in perfect health, dead in his office, with no witnesses. Your uncle found him."

"Malcolm." She said the name like it might save her. "Malcolm will fix this, he'll call the police, he'll—"

"Your uncle poured the drink that stopped his heart." Julian said it gently, almost kindly, as if he were breaking bad news about the weather. "Malcolm has been very useful to me, Sera. More useful than you ever were."

Seraphina's mind went white with static. Six years. Six years she had loved this man, had planned a wedding with him, had let him into every room of her life. And he was telling her, in a voice as calm as a man discussing dinner reservations, that he had murdered her father and turned her own blood against her.

"Why," she whispered.

"Because your father built an empire and left it to a daughter who thinks with her heart instead of her head." Julian said it while buttoning his jacket, as if preparing for a meeting. "Do you know how much the Kade shipping contracts are worth? How much influence your family has in this city? And you were going to hand all of it to me the day you signed the marriage contract. All I had to do was wait."

"You never loved me."

"I loved what you were going to give me." He crouched again, closer this time, his voice dropping. "But you're taking too long to die on your own schedule, so we're going to speed things up. There's a document in my car. Transfer of the Kade holding company. All you have to do is sign it, and I'll let you live quietly somewhere far from here. Sign it, Sera."

She looked at him, this man she had trusted with every version of herself, and understood with sudden and total clarity that she had never known him at all.

"No."

Julian's jaw tightened. "No?"

"You killed my father." Her voice, to her own surprise, did not shake. "You think I'm going to hand you the rest of what he built? I would rather die."

"That," Julian said, "can be arranged."

He nodded toward the shadows, and a man she didn't recognize stepped forward with something metal glinting in his hand. Seraphina's heart slammed against her ribs. She thought of her mother, of the house she grew up in, of every ordinary morning she had wasted assuming there would be more of them.

And then, from somewhere outside, she heard the warehouse door tear off its hinges.

The lights went out.

For three full seconds there was only rain and darkness and her own ragged breathing. Then gunfire, close and deafening, and Julian swearing, and bodies hitting concrete. Seraphina screamed without meaning to. A hand closed over her mouth from behind, and she thrashed until a low voice spoke directly into her ear.

"Stop fighting me. I'm not going to hurt you."

She knew that voice. She had heard it exactly twice before, both times at events her father hosted, both times from across a crowded room. Damon Voss.

The ropes fell away from her wrists, cut clean by a blade she never saw. Damon pulled her to her feet, and even in the chaos, even with blood running into her eyes, she registered how solid he was, how absolutely certain his movements were, like a man who had never once doubted what he was capable of.

"Why are you here," she managed.

"Later." He pushed her behind him as another shot cracked through the dark. "Right now you're going to run when I tell you to run."

Julian's voice rose somewhere to her left, sharp with fury and disbelief. "Voss. This isn't your business."

"You made it my business the moment you touched a Kade," Damon said, and there was something in his tone, cold and final, that made even Julian go quiet for a moment.

Seraphina never saw exactly what happened next. There was more gunfire, a struggle, the specific sound of a body falling that she would remember for the rest of whatever life she had left. Damon's hand found hers in the dark and pulled her toward the door, and for one wild, disorienting second she let herself believe she might survive this.

Then the pain came.

It bloomed low in her side, sudden and enormous, and her legs stopped working correctly. She hadn't even heard the shot. Damon caught her before she hit the ground, and she looked down at her own hands, at the dark spreading across the blue fabric of her dress, and thought, distantly, that it didn't look real.

"No." Damon's voice, always so controlled, cracked around the word. He pressed his hand hard against her side, and she felt him lift her, felt the world tilt and blur. "Stay awake. Sera. Look at me."

She tried. His face swam above her, sharper than she had ever let herself really look at it before, and she thought, absurdly, that she had spent six years being afraid of the wrong man.

"Damon," she whispered.

"Don't talk. Save it."

"Tell my mother." Her voice was fading even to her own ears. "Tell her I love her."

"You'll tell her yourself." His voice was fierce now, almost angry, as if he could bully death into backing away. "Stay with me. That's an order."

She wanted to laugh at that, at him giving her orders as she lay dying in his arms, but the darkness was already closing in from the edges of her vision, soft and total, and the last thing she felt was rain on her face and the last thing she heard was her own name, said like it mattered, before everything went silent.

Seraphina Kade opened her eyes to sunlight.

For a long moment she simply lay there, breathing, waiting for the pain in her side to return. It didn't come. She was warm. Dry. There was no rain, no concrete, no rope burns on her wrists. She was lying in her own bed, in her own room, surrounded by the pale gold curtains her mother had chosen for her sixteenth birthday.

Her hand went to her side on instinct. No wound. No blood. Just smooth, unbroken skin under her fingers.

She sat up so fast her head spun. The room around her was exactly as it had been years ago, before she moved into the penthouse with Julian. The perfume bottles on her dresser. The photograph of her and her father at her university graduation. A phone she hadn't owned in three years sat charging on the nightstand.

With shaking hands, she picked it up. The date on the screen made her stop breathing entirely.

Three years earlier.

Her father was alive. He had to be alive. She scrambled out of bed and ran to her door, threw it open, and there in the hallway was her mother, very much alive, very much unbothered, glancing up in surprise from a stack of invitations.

"Sera? You're up early. Is everything all right?"

Seraphina couldn't answer. She stood there staring at her mother's face, a face she had watched grow thin and grey with grief in the months after her father's death, and now here it was, full and warm and completely unaware of anything.

"I'm fine," Seraphina finally managed. "I just had a strange dream."

She went back into her room and closed the door, and only then did she let herself shake. She sat on the edge of the bed and pressed both hands over her mouth to keep from making a sound.

She remembered everything. The engagement to Julian. The wedding plans. The warehouse. Her father's death. Malcolm's betrayal. The document. The gunshot. Damon's face above hers as she died.

It hadn't been a dream. She had lived it. She had died in that warehouse three years from now, and something, some force she didn't understand and didn't need to understand, had sent her back here, to this exact morning, with every memory intact.

She had a second chance.

Her phone buzzed on the nightstand. A message from Julian, sweet and familiar and utterly nauseating now that she knew what waited behind it. Good morning, beautiful. Thinking about you already.

Three years ago, that message would have made her smile. Now her stomach turned.

She set the phone down carefully, and for the first time since waking, she let herself think clearly instead of just feeling. Julian would kill her father. Malcolm would help him. It would take years, careful years of manipulation and patience, before either of them showed their hand. If she confronted them now, with nothing but memories no one would believe, she would only warn them to be more careful. She would only make herself a target sooner.

She needed to be smarter this time. Colder. She needed proof, allies, and power of her own before she moved against either of them.

And she needed protection strong enough that neither Julian nor Malcolm would dare touch her while she built it.

Only one name came to mind. The man who had torn a warehouse door off its hinges to reach her. The man everyone in this city feared and she once had too, right up until the moment he held her as she died.

Damon Voss.

She didn't know yet why he had come for her that night, why the heir to the most dangerous family in the city had risked a war over a woman his family had no real business protecting. She intended to find out. But first, she needed him on her side, permanently, in a way Julian could never touch and Malcolm could never buy.

Her hands were steady now as she picked the phone back up and scrolled to a number she had no memory of ever calling in this timeline, and yet somehow knew by heart. She stared at it for a long moment, three years of grief and fury and a death she alone remembered pressing against her ribs.

Then she pressed call.

He answered on the third ring, his voice flat and unfamiliar with her, exactly the voice of a stranger who had never held her while she bled out in his arms.

"Who is this?"

Seraphina closed her eyes and steadied her breath.

"Damon Voss," she said. "This is Seraphina Kade. I need to talk to you in person. Tonight."

A pause. She could hear the faint sound of a city street behind him, cars, distant voices, and it struck her that somewhere across that same city, her father was still alive, still breathing, still hers to save.

"I don't know you," Damon said finally. "Why would I meet with a Kade?"

Seraphina's grip tightened around the phone. This was the moment. There was no version of her plan that didn't begin here.

"Because I'm going to make you an offer you've never heard before," she said. "I want to marry you."