Chapter 5

Cain's POV

The plane touched down twenty minutes early, and I still wasn’t ready to be home.

I spent the entire drive from the airport with my phone in my hand and the radio off, scrolling through the schedule my assistant had prepared for the week. Meetings. Calls. A dinner with investors on Tuesday. A board review on Wednesday.

Anything was better than thinking about what today actually was. My father’s new wife, a house full of family, and an entire weekend of pretending everything was normal.

Apparently, five years of rebuilding the company, cleaning up disasters that hadn’t been mine to begin with, and proving I’d grown beyond the mess I’d made during my last year at Halstead still didn’t count for much where my father was concerned. He wanted his son home at the table, smiling and playing along.

I couldn’t entirely blame him. After everything I’d done, maybe I owed him a few uncomfortable dinners.

I’d missed the wedding and I’d told everyone the merger in Singapore had needed me there, and that part was true. The company had needed me.

What I hadn’t admitted was how relieved I’d been to have an excuse. I didn’t know Bianca wasn't sure the kind of woman my father had married, and I wasn’t eager to sit through a celebration of a new beginning when I still carried too much regret from the past.

The gates were already open when the car turned into the driveway and Marcus was waiting on the front steps, grinning like he’d been standing there for an hour just for the pleasure of watching me arrive exhausted.

“There he is.” He came down the steps toward me. “The prodigal son returns.”

I grabbed my suitcase from the driver. “Please Marcus, don’t start.”

He laughed and slung an arm over my shoulder anyway. “I haven’t even started yet, bro,” he said."You missed the wedding, by the way. Dad's still bitter about it."

"I sent a gift."

He actually stopped walking. “A gift. That’s your defense?”

I shrugged. “It was a good gift.”

“Very personal. I’m sure Bianca felt the love.” He shook his head, laughing,

Footsteps came from the entrance before I could say anything else. Ivy came down the stairs two at a time, hair knotted up like it had barely survived the afternoon, and skipped hello entirely.

“You’re actually going to like her.”

“Who?”

“Our new sister.” She kept walking toward me, oblivious to what that sentence had just done to the inside of my head. “Roxy. She’s not what I expected at all.”

The name landed somewhere in my head before I could brace for it.

Roxy, could it be no, it couldn’t be her. There had to be hundreds of Roxys in the world hundreds of women who had nothing to do with the girl I still thought about, the one I’d spent six years trying to stop thinking about, the one I’d hurt so badly she’d changed her whole life to get away from me.

“Great,” I said, keeping my face flat. “Can’t wait.”

Ivy narrowed her eyes at me. “You could at least pretend to be excited about gaining another sibling.”

"I'm thrilled, Ivy. Genuinely."

She snorted."Liar."

I didn't argue. There wasn't much point explaining to my little sister that the last time our father had rearranged my life without asking me first, it had cost me my future.

We found him in the sitting room, laughing at his own punchline before he'd even reached it, in the middle of one of those stories he tells at every gathering. And a lady was beside him with her hand resting over his on the arm of the couch.

"There is my." My father rose to greet me. "Cain, I want you to meet Bianca."

"Mrs. Carrington." I took her offered hand. "Sorry I missed the big day."

"Don't be." Her smile didn't move much. "Weddings are for the people who show up. The rest of it is for family."

It was a strange thing to say, but I didn't think much of it at the time.

My father clapped his hands together, already moving on to the next part of the introduction like he'd rehearsed the whole afternoon. "And this," he said, turning toward the doorway behind me, "is Bianca's daughter. Your new sister."

I turned and every ounce of air left my lungs at once. She stood in the doorway in a plain green sweater, her hair cut shorter than I remembered sharper somehow, framing a face that had haunted the back of every good year I'd had since I was eighteen years old.

Six years, and I would have known her in a crowd of a thousand people with my eyes closed. Roxy.

My father kept talking, introducing her the way you'd introduce anyone, my wife's daughter, Roxy, but the words came through underwater. My whole body went cold and then hot in the same second, my hands curling at my sides like they still remembered exactly what they'd lost.

A cold swept through me first, then a rush of heat right behind it, because I wasn’t standing in my father’s house anymore I was back to that party.

“Roxy, this is my son, Cain.” My father said it like we were meeting for the first time, like there was nothing behind it.

I had spent years imagining what would happen if I ever saw her again. In some versions, she hated me. In others, she cried. Sometimes I’d imagined myself apologizing, telling her I’d been young and stupid and that I would give anything to undo what I’d done.

I’d never imagined her looking at me like I was a stranger.

I wanted to say something anything, but my mouth wouldn’t cooperate with any of it.

She crossed the space between us slowly and held out her hand. “Hello, brother.”

Two words, and they did more damage than the years of silence before them. She’d turned me into that, a stranger with a title and nothing else.

Her hand was steady in mine, but mine wasn't and she didn’t seem to notice maybe she did and simply didn’t care.

I searched her face for some sign that she remembered, a flicker of the girl I’d known or an indication that seeing me had shaken her even half as much as seeing her had shaken me. But there was nothing.

She let go first.

“Cain.” My father’s voice pulled me back into the room. “Are You alright, son? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

I forced a small smile. "Long flight. That's all."

The lie came easily.

My father accepted it with a nod and turned back toward the others, but I didn’t. Instead, my gaze found Roxy again. She was already talking to Ivy, listening to whatever my sister was saying with a small smile on her face.

She looked fine better than fine. She looked like someone who had built an entirely new life and left the old one somewhere far behind.

I should have been relieved. Rather, guilt settled heavier in my chest.

Six years ago, I’d watched a girl I once cared about break in front of me while my friends laughed. I’d spent years telling myself I’d changed since then and maybe I had. But standing across the room from Roxy, I realized something I’d never considered; changing didn’t erase what you’d done.

And now the girl I’d spent six years trying to forget was standing inside my father’s house, and she was my new stepsister.