Chapter 2

"Potential for molding," he murmured. "For learning. For understanding exactly what I need, even when I don't say it explicitly."

I should have been offended. Should have pulled my hand away and told him exactly where he could place his corporate opportunity. Instead, I felt something hot and electric coil low in my stomach, a response that frightened me even as it thrilled me.

"And if I don't want to be molded?" I asked, my voice steadier than I felt.

"Then this won't work." He released my hand and stepped back, returning to a state of perfect professional distance. "But I don't think that's the case with you, Nova. I think you're very aware of what you need, and I think you're willing to do what's necessary to get it."

There was something uncomfortably perceptive in that assessment. He'd seen through my careful armor within minutes of meeting me.

"Your first day is Monday," he said, moving back behind his desk as if the moment had never happened. "Seven a.m. You'll receive an email from my assistant with the details. There will be a background check, a confidentiality agreement, and a non-disclosure clause that covers not just corporate information but anything you observe or overhear while in my employ."

I nodded, still feeling the ghost of his touch on my skin.

"One more thing," he said as I turned toward the door. I looked back to find him watching me with that infuriating smirk. "Whatever happens in the course of this position, I want you to understand something from the beginning."

"What's that?" I whispered.

His gaze was molten now, intense enough to make my skin feel too tight. "I always get what I want, Nova. Always. And right now, I want you to succeed in this role."

The subtext hung in the air between us, heavy with implication. It took me a moment to realize he was dismissing me.

The drive back to my apartment was a blur of autopilot city streets and my own spiraling thoughts. By the time I stumbled through my door, my hands were still trembling.

My roommate, Sage, looked up from her laptop with immediate concern. "Okay, what happened? You look like you've seen a ghost."

"Worse," I muttered, collapsing onto our threadbare couch. "I think I just signed a deal with someone very dangerous."

"What do you mean? Is the job bad? Did they say something inappropriate?" Sage sat up, her protective instincts immediately activated.

I told her everything, the estate that seemed designed to make ordinary people feel small, the man who seemed constructed specifically to unsettle my ability to think clearly, the strange intensity of his attention, the way he'd looked at me like he could see something in me that I didn't yet understand about myself.

"Nova," Sage said carefully when I finished, "that sounds... intense."

"That's one word for it." I pulled my knees up to my chest, trying to make sense of the overwhelming sensation that something fundamental had shifted in the space of an afternoon. "I think I might have made a mistake."

"Or," Sage said thoughtfully, "you might have just walked into something that's going to change everything."

That night, I lay in bed unable to sleep, replaying the afternoon over and over. The way he'd said my name. The touch of his hand. The promise in his final words.

Sometime around three in the morning, I finally drifted off.

And I dreamed of a man with silver eyes and a voice like smoke, reaching for me in a life that felt simultaneously familiar and impossibly distant. In the dream, I knew him. Not from today, but from somewhere deeper… somewhere in the marrow of my bones where recognition lived before memory. He was reaching for me, and I was reaching back, and the emotion that flooded through me was so intense, so overwhelming, that it jolted me awake.

I lay in the darkness, heart pounding, unable to shake the feeling that I'd just remembered something terribly important… or forgotten something I desperately needed to recall.

My phone buzzed on my nightstand. A text from an unknown number:

“Welcome to Rochefort Global. Your orientation packet has been sent to your email. Arrive Monday 6:45 a.m. —MR”

The initials seemed to glow in the darkness of my room.

I stared at the message for a long time, unable to shake the sensation that this was the moment everything changed. That I'd just accepted an invitation to something far more complicated than a temporary job.

That I'd accepted an invitation into something 

I didn't yet understand, but already suspected I couldn't refuse.