Chapter 1: The Night They Broke Me

Serena’s POV

“You really outdid yourself this time, Serena. I have attended every Rhodes event for the past three years and this is by far the best one yet.”

I smiled at David Chen, Rhodes CFO and head of partnerships, and raised my glass. “Three months of planning. Every detail matters.”

“Three months.” He shook his head, laughing. “Killian is the luckiest man in this industry and he doesn’t even know it.”

I laughed with him because it was easy and because I believed it. Killian knew. He always knew. He had told me once, very quietly, that the company would have been dead in the water without me. That I was the reason any of it worked. I had held that sentence close for three years like something precious.

David moved on to greet someone else and I stood at the edge of the ballroom and looked at everything I had built.

The white dahlias on every table. I had spent eleven days sourcing them from a farm in California because Killian had mentioned once, years ago, that his mother grew them in her garden. The lighting I had adjusted myself during setup because the original team got the temperature wrong. The guest list I had curated over six weeks, every name chosen deliberately, every table placement considered.

Three years ago, Rhodes Incorporated was a failing startup operating out of a single room in Midtown with two employees and a debt that would have buried most people.

I had walked away from an Oxford scholarship for this. I had taken every dollar my grandmother left me and poured it into Killian’s vision when the banks wouldn’t touch him and his own family told him to quit. I wrote the pitch decks he presented as his own. I sat across from investors who underestimated me and I charmed them into writing checks. I built everything while he stood on top of it and collected every headline, every handshake, every cover story.

I did not mind. I loved him. I had always loved him.

“This place looks incredible.” Vivian appeared at my side, looping her arm through mine the way she had done since we were nineteen. Six years of friendship. My person. “Serena, you are genuinely extraordinary. You know that?”

“Stop it.” I bumped her shoulder. “Have you seen Killian? He was supposed to give the opening remarks twenty minutes ago.”

“He’s around.” She paused. “Actually can we talk for a second? Just us?”

Something in her voice made me look at her properly. She was smiling but her eyes were doing something else entirely.

“What’s wrong?”

She steered me toward the quiet end of the bar, away from the nearest guests. When she turned to face me her expression was careful in a way that Vivian’s face had never needed to be careful with me before.

“I have been hearing things tonight,” she said. “About the Mercer account. About missing funds. About leaked projections ending up at Hartwell Group.” She held my gaze. “Your name keeps coming up Serena.”

I stared at her. “My name.”

“I know how it sounds. I am telling you because I love you and you need to get ahead of this before…”

“Vivian.” My voice dropped. “I gave up Oxford for this company. I invested my entire inheritance when it was worth nothing. I have given three years of my life to Killian and to Rhodes Incorporated. What are you saying to me right now?”

“I am saying people are talking.” She put her hand on my arm. Her eyes were warm and concerned and completely, perfectly lying. “I am saying you need to be careful tonight.”

I looked at her hand on my arm. I looked at her face. And something cold moved through my chest, slow and certain, the way water moves through a crack in stone.

“You did this,” I said.

“Serena…”

“How long?” My voice cracked. “How long have you been planning this? How long have you been sitting in my home and calling yourself my best friend while you…”

“Long enough, sweetheart.”

My mouth fell open in shock, not expecting her to actually confess. I picked up the nearest champagne glass and threw it at her chest. It shattered, champagne soaking through her red dress, and she stumbled back with a shriek that turned every head within twenty feet.

“Are you insane?” She pressed her hands to the soaked fabric, her eyes wide and performing shock beautifully.

“You destroyed everything!” I was crying now, fully, in front of everyone, and I could not stop and I did not care. “How could you do this to me?”

“Someone help please!” Vivian’s voice rang out across the room. “She just attacked me!”

Hands closed around my arms. I fought them. I heard my own voice screaming Killian’s name across the ballroom and I watched him appear through the crowd with two security guards flanking him and an expression on his face that stopped my heart completely.

Not anger. Not confusion. A decision already made.

“Killian.” I pulled against the hands holding me and reached for him. “Please. Whatever she told you it is a lie. I would never steal from you. You know me. Three years. You know me.”

He looked at my outstretched hand. Then he looked at my face.

“The Mercer account,” he said quietly. “The wire transfers. The leaked documents.” His jaw tightened. “I have everything Serena.”

“She planted it.” I was sobbing so hard I could barely form words. “She planted all of it Killian please. I love you. I built everything you have and I would never, I swear to you I would never…”

“Remove her.” He said it to the security guards without looking away from me. “Now.”

They dragged me backward through the crowd. I screamed his name until my voice gave out. Three hundred people watched in complete silence. Not one of them moved.

The last thing I saw before the doors closed was Vivian stepping to Killian’s side and placing her hand flat against his chest and looking at me over his shoulder with those warm familiar eyes.

“I really did love her,” she said softly, to the room. “This breaks my heart.”

The doors shut in my face.

I collapsed against the wall of the service corridor and slid down it and sat on the cold floor and sobbed until I had nothing left inside me.

Then I got up. Because I was Serena Cole and Serena Cole did not stay on the floor.

I walked to my car. I got in. I put my hands on the wheel.

My phone lit up. Killian’s name, over and over.

I drove out into the rain and did not answer.

It was only when I reached the first intersection that I noticed it.

A black car. No headlights. Tailing me.

I changed lanes. It changed lanes.

I took a turn I had not planned to take. It took the same turn.

My hands tightened on the wheel. I pressed the accelerator and watched my speedometer climb and reached for my phone to call someone, anyone, and that was when I pressed the brakes.

Nothing happened.

I pressed them again. Harder. The car did not slow.

The intersection ahead was coming up fast. Too fast. A red light and cross traffic and I was pressing the brakes with both feet now and nothing was happening and I finally understood.

The car was coming straight at me and there was nothing I could do.

But in the half second before impact, caught in the wash of headlights, I saw the driver.

My blood went colder than the brakes that had already failed me.

I knew that face.

Then the world ended.