Chapter 1

Dante Blackwood didn’t look up. The screen light hit his face. Blue. Cold. He sat at the head of the mahogany table, the silence of the room a physical weight. He had a silver pen in his right hand. He didn’t click it. He didn’t tap it. He just held it, a small, polished anchor in a room of people waiting for him to speak. The twelve board members sat perfectly still. They watched the pen. They watched his eyes. They were terrified of the silence.

​"Singapore," Dante said. His voice was low, carrying across the polished wood without effort. "The numbers are wrong."

​Nobody spoke. The HVAC system hummed, a sterile, expensive sound.

​"Marcus. The four percent gap. Explain it."

​Marcus cleared his throat. It was a wet, nervous sound that echoed. He looked at his tablet, his fingers trembling as he scrolled. "Market shift, sir. Fourth quarter. We didn't... the analytics didn't predict the volatility. It was sudden."

​"I don't pay you for sudden." Dante looked up. Gray eyes. Like slate. Like the sky before a hard winter. "I pay for control. If the market shifts, you shift it back. If the numbers don't match the projection, you make the world match the numbers. This is a billion-dollar merger, not a lemonade stand."

​"Sir, the geopolitical—"

​"I don't care about the news, Marcus. I care about the exit strategy. You have twenty-four hours to find that four percent or you can find a new firm to disappoint."

​The double doors at the back of the boardroom opened. They were heavy, soundproofed wood, designed to keep the world out. They didn't creak, but the shift in air pressure was enough to make every head turn. No one knocked. No one ever interrupted a Blackwood Global closed session.

​Bella Vance walked in.

​She wore a charcoal suit. Sharp. Tailored. Her hair was pulled back into a knot so tight it looked painful. She carried a leather portfolio under her arm like a shield. She didn't look at the board members. She didn't look at the expensive art on the walls or the panoramic view of the skyline. She just looked at the empty chair at the far end of the table, exactly opposite Dante.

​Dante’s pen stopped. It stayed frozen an inch above the mahogany. He stopped breathing for a second. The world outside the window—the sirens, the wind, the millions of people—simply ceased to exist.

​"This is a closed session," Dante said. Flat.

​"I know," Bella said.

​Her voice was different. Steelier. The soft edges he remembered from three years ago were gone, replaced by a cold, professional resonance. She went to the chair. She pulled it out. The long, loud scrape of the legs against the floor made Marcus jump. Bella sat. She didn't ask for permission. She placed a single business card on the table and slid it with her index finger. It stopped halfway across the table, white and stark against the dark wood.

​Dante looked at the card. Then he looked at her.

​Three years.

​Three years since she had walked out of his penthouse at 3:00 AM. No note. No suitcase. Just a cold pillow and a silence that had lasted a thousand days. He had spent the first six months looking for her. He had spent the next two years trying to convince himself he hadn't.

​"You're in the wrong city, Bella," Dante said.

​"The contract says I'm not."

​She opened her folder. Her fingers were steady, but he noticed the way she gripped the edge of the leather. "Vance and Associates has been retained by your majority shareholders. They’re concerned about the Singapore leak. I’m here to lead the independent audit."

​She didn't wait for him to respond. She turned her gaze to the man on her right.

​"Marcus. The fourth quarter. Go on. I checked the filings before I walked in. The offshore accounts in the Cayman subsidiary don't match your story about volatility. There’s a ghost expenditure of twelve million. Care to explain that before I put it in the preliminary report?"

​The room felt like a vacuum. Nobody was breathing. Marcus looked at Dante, his eyes pleading for help. Dante didn't give it. He was just staring at Bella’s hands. He was looking for a ring. He was looking for a sign of where she had been.

​"Leave," Dante said.

​"Mr. Blackwood, we still have the—"

​"Get out. Now."

​Chairs scraped. People moved fast, gathering their tablets and phones with frantic energy. They didn't look back. They didn't whisper. The doors clicked shut, and the silence returned, but it wasn't the silence of a boardroom anymore. It was the silence of a tomb.

​Dante stood up. He didn't go to her. He went to the window. He didn't look at the buildings. He looked at her reflection in the glass.

​"The subpoenas," he said. "You ignored them. My investigators... they found nothing. You just stopped."

​Bella didn't look at him. She looked at her tablet. She was scrolling through a spreadsheet, but her eyes weren't moving fast enough to be reading. "I was busy, Dante."

​"Busy." Dante turned around. He leaned against the glass, the sun at his back. "For three years? My guys said the Midwest. Some town near the border. Why there?"

​Bella’s thumb moved on the screen. Just a twitch. A small, involuntary movement. She thought about her phone in her pocket. She thought about the 4:00 PM alarm. The school bus. The lunchbox with the crusts cut off. She looked at the sticky note on the corner of her tablet, a messy scrawl she’d written in the taxi: Pick up Leo, Maya, and Toby by 4. Don't forget the inhaler.

​"My life isn't part of the audit, Dante. I’m here to do a job."

​"Everything is part of the audit when it’s my company."

​Dante walked toward her. Slow. Deliberate. He stopped a few feet away. He didn't touch her, but he could feel the heat radiating off her. She smelled like she always had—jasmine and something like rain—but there was a new scent now. Soap. Cheap, drugstore soap.

​"Why come back? You knew. The second you signed a contract with a board seat in this district, I’d know. You knew I wouldn't let it go."

​"I needed the leverage," Bella said. Her voice broke, just a tiny fraction. She stopped. Cleared her throat. "My firm has a seat here now. I have the legal right to every server, every email, every private ledger. If you interfere... if you follow me again or try to force a meeting outside these walls... I’ll leak the sub-ledgers. All of them. Blackwood Global will be a case study in federal court by Friday."

​Dante narrowed his eyes. He watched her. She was holding the edge of the table so hard her knuckles were white. She wasn't here for a fight. She wasn't here for revenge. She was hiding something, and she was using his own company as a shield to keep him at a distance.

​"You keep looking at your watch," Dante said.

​"I have a commitment."

​"At five o'clock on a Tuesday?"

​Dante reached out. Before she could move, he took the leather folder from the table.

​"Don't," she said. It wasn't a command. It was a plea.

​He opened it anyway. He didn't see audit files. He didn't see spreadsheets. He found a single sheet of paper tucked into the side pocket. A medical record. Five years old. His own name was at the top. A genetic screening they had done when they were... before.

​Someone had used a red marker. A specific section regarding a rare blood marker.

​Dante looked at the paper. Then the date she left. He did the math in his head. The cold, logical calculator that had made him a billionaire just stopped.

​He looked at her. Really looked at her. The exhaustion in her eyes wasn't from the flight. It was from years of a weight he couldn't imagine.

​"Bella," he whispered.

​She stood up. She grabbed the paper back, her fingers shaking visibly now. She stuffed it into the folder.

​"I didn't come back for you," she said. Her voice was trembling, but her eyes were hard.

​She headed for the door. She didn't look back. She didn't wait for him to respond.

​"I came back because the specialist at the Children's Hospital... the one who handles this specific pathology... he only takes people with a Blackwood referral. He’s on your foundation’s payroll."

​She stopped at the door. Her hand was on the heavy brass handle. She didn't turn around, but her shoulders were shaking.

​"He has your eyes, Dante. And he’s running out of time."

​The silence in the room was absolute. It was the heaviest thing Dante had ever felt.

​He watched her go. He didn't move. He couldn't. The world was shifting under his feet, the skyscrapers outside suddenly feeling like toothpicks.

​"Wait," he said.

​She didn't wait. The door shut with a soft, final click.

​Dante stood there in the center of the room. The medical record. The red marker. The eyes.

​"Three years," he said to the empty room.

​He went back to the table. He picked up the business card she had left. Vance & Associates. He turned it over. There was a smudge of something on the back. Blue ink.

​He held it up to the light of the window.

​It was a drawing. A small, messy, blue-ink dinosaur with a long neck and three legs.

​Dante felt his throat get tight. He sat down in the chair she had just occupied. The room was too big. The lights were too bright. Everything he had built—the towers, the mergers, the billions—it all felt like ash.

​He picked up the phone.

​"Get me the director of the Children's Hospital," he said. His voice was cracked.

​"Sir? It's after five. The office is—"

​"I don't care. Get him on the phone. Now."

​He hung up. He looked at the dinosaur.

​Three years of looking for a ghost. Three years of silence. And she had been right there, four hundred miles away, holding up the sky by herself.

​Dante leaned back and closed his eyes. He could still smell her. Jasmine. And soap.

​The kid. Leo. Running out of time.

​He opened his laptop. He didn't look at the Singapore files. He didn't look at Marcus’s failures. He started typing. He looked for her name, Isabella Vance, in every database he had.

​And then he saw it. A news clip from a small-town paper. A fundraiser from six months ago.

​Local boy fights rare condition. Community rallies for Leo Vance.

​There was a photo.

​Dante zoomed in. The boy was sitting on a park bench. He had a baseball cap on, pulled low. He was smiling, holding a plastic dinosaur.

​He had gray eyes.

​Dante stared at the screen until his own eyes burned. The silver pen on the table rolled slightly as the building vibrated from a passing train. It hit the floor with a tiny click.

​He didn't pick it up. He just sat there in the blue light of the monitor.

​The phone rang.

​"Mr. Blackwood? I have the director."

​Dante cleared his throat. He looked at the boy's eyes on the screen.

​"This is Dante Blackwood," he said, his voice returning to that low, melodic friction. "I have a son at your hospital. Tell me what he needs to stay alive."