Chapter 3

I ran for a long time before I finally lost the reporters.

Broken glass on the street had cut up my feet, but I had no time to think about the pain.

My hands were blue with cold. I called every relative and business partner who'd ever been close to my family, trying them again and again.

"Glen, could you lend me five million? Just to get me through this..."

"This is Killian we're talking about... I'm sorry, Chloe."

Glen Porter hung up on me without a second thought.

The second anyone heard Killian's name, they avoided me like the plague.

He really was the most terrifying man on Wall Street.

Ten years ago, my father had driven Killian to the brink when he was just starting out.

Now, after ten years of lying in wait, the devil had left me no way out.

I thought of my father in that hospital in Switzerland, paralyzed for three years and kept alive by machines.

If I couldn't come up with the money by morning, my family wouldn't just go bankrupt. My father's ventilator would be shut off.

Somewhere out in that rain, the last of my pride crumbled.

I had no other choice.

Onyx Hall, on the North Shore of Long Island.

To my surprise, the front doors swung open on their own as I reached them.

I stepped onto the carpet in the grand hall with bleeding feet.

I knew exactly what I was doing. I was walking straight into his trap and betting everything I had on it.

"The Winslow heiress has some nerve, barging in here in the middle of the night."

I looked up. Killian was coming down the stairs, one slow step at a time.

He wore nothing but a robe, hanging open to reveal his chest and a few old scars. Some were probably from the time my father had driven him to the brink.

He kept closing in, all six feet three inches of him.

I was shaking all over, my teeth chattering from the cold.

"You're the one who bought up all our secured debt and bankrupted us."

"I am." He took another step closer. "Three months ago, I scooped up every piece of defaulted Winslow debt on the market. Technically, the carpet you're standing on, your family's house, even that ratty shirt you're wearing, all of it already belongs to me."

"My father has been paralyzed for three years!" My anger drowned out my fear, and I grabbed a fistful of his robe. "Killian, are you really going to wipe us out?"

Killian let me hold on. Then his right hand shot out without warning and clamped around the back of my neck, forcing my head up.

"Wipe you out? If I really wanted to wipe you out, your father's ventilator would've been unplugged this morning."

I tightened my grip on his robe and tried to bargain with the last thing of value I had. "I still control Winslow's core technology. If you want it, it's on the table..."

He scoffed and cut me off. "I spent three years setting this up and sank two billion dollars in cash into it. You really think I did all that for your family's forty-eight million in bad debt and your so-called 'core technology'?"

He was so close that I could feel the heat of his body through my soaked shirt.

Lightning flashed white outside the window, and I saw the madness in his eyes as clear as day.

He kept advancing, and I kept backing away until I hit the floor-to-ceiling window.

"What do you want from me...?"