Chapter 1

I was never the kind of girl people fought to keep.

I knew that the way you know certain things about yourself without anyone saying them out loud. Nobody sits you down and tells you. You just feel it, somewhere quiet and deep, like a stone resting at the bottom of still water. Always there. Never moving.

My name is Sera Quinn. I am twenty two years old. I work two jobs, send half of every paycheck to my sick mother, and I have been in love with the same man for two years.

At least I thought I was.

I came home early that Tuesday because of a headache that had been sitting behind my eyes since morning. The clinic manager took one look at me and told me to go rest. I thanked her. I was tired in the kind of way that sleep does not fix, the deep bone tired that comes from carrying too much for too long without putting anything down.

The apartment was supposed to be empty.

I heard them before I even reached the hallway.

Jace's voice first. Low and familiar and warm in a way that made my chest tighten before I even understood why. Then my stepsister Delia's laugh, soft and breathless, slipping out from underneath her closed bedroom door.

I stopped walking.

I stood in the hallway with my keys still in my hand and told myself I was hearing things. Told myself there was a reasonable explanation. Told myself all the small comfortable lies a person tells themselves in the seconds before everything falls apart.

Then Jace said her name.

He said it the way he used to say mine.

Like it was the only word that mattered in the entire room.

I do not remember sitting down on the floor. I just remember that at some point my back was against the wall and my knees were pulled to my chest and the teeth of my keys were leaving marks in my palm because I was gripping them so hard. Like if I just held on tight enough, something would stay.

Nothing stayed.

Two years.

Two years of him telling me I was his whole world. Two years of me believing every single word because I wanted so badly to be someone's whole world. Two years of my stepsister sitting across from me at dinner with that small careful smile on her face, looking me directly in the eye, and I had never once suspected her.

Not once.

I do not know how long I sat on that floor. Long enough for the light through the window to shift from afternoon gold to something grayer and flat. Long enough for the sounds behind the door to go quiet. Long enough for the pain to settle and harden into something I did not have a name for yet.

I got up eventually. I went to the kitchen. I sat at the table and I stared at the wall and I did not cry because there was nothing left to cry with. I had used all of it up on smaller things over the years and this, the biggest thing, just sat inside me like a stone with no tears to soften it.

That was where Roland found me.

My stepfather came through the front door at exactly six thirty the way he always did, briefcase in hand, wearing that particular smile of his that never changed no matter what was happening. He looked at me sitting at the table and he did not ask what was wrong.

He just sat down across from me.

"I know about Jace," he said.

I looked at him. "How."

He waved one hand like the question had no real answer worth giving. "Sera. I need you to listen carefully. What happened today hurts and I understand that. But there is something more important we need to talk about right now."

"My boyfriend is in my stepsister's room," I said. "And you want to talk about something more important."

"Your mother is running out of time."

The room went very still.

He let that sit between us. Roland was good at silence. He always knew exactly how many seconds to let something bleed before he started talking again.

"The surgery she needs is four hundred thousand dollars," he said. "I have looked at every option. I have called in every contact I have. There is only one path forward." He folded his hands on the table, calm as a man reading a weather report. "The Voss family is looking for someone to marry their son."

I knew the name. Everyone in Halcrest knew the name.

Damien Voss. Thirty four years old. CEO of Voss Industries. The kind of powerful that made other powerful people speak quietly. He had been in a coma for seven months after his car went off a mountain road outside the city on a rainy November night.

The doctors had given him until the end of the year.

"They are offering a full arrangement," Roland continued. "Your mother's surgery covered completely. Your student debt cleared. A private account set up in your name. A home to live in. Security. Everything you do not have right now."

My mouth felt dry. "He is in a coma."

"Yes."

"He might not wake up."

"The medical team believes he will not."

The silence between us stretched out wide and cold.

"You want me to marry a dying man," I said.

Roland looked at me with those steady unremarkable eyes of his. "I want your mother to live another year. Right now those two things are connected."

I looked down at my hands on the table. The marks from my keys were still pressed into my palm, little red lines that were already starting to fade.

I thought about my mother's voice on the phone three days ago. Thin and careful and trying so hard to sound okay for my benefit. Asking me how work was going. Asking me if I was eating properly. Sick as she was, still worrying about me.

I thought about Jace's voice behind a closed door.

I thought about every wall I had ever built trying to keep my life from falling apart and how every single one of them had come down anyway, one brick at a time, until I was just standing here in a kitchen with red marks on my hands and nothing left to hold.

"Three days?" I asked.

Something moved in Roland's eyes. Just a flicker. There and gone.

"Three days," he confirmed.

I nodded. Slowly. Like a person agreeing to something they already know they cannot undo.

"Alright," I said quietly. "I will do it."

Roland stood up and buttoned his jacket. He picked up his briefcase from the floor. "I will make the arrangements tonight."

He walked out of the kitchen and I sat there alone with the gray afternoon light coming through the window and the silence of the apartment pressing in around me.

I did not see the way his shoulders relaxed the moment he turned his back.

I did not see the phone he pulled from his inside pocket before he even reached the hallway.

But I heard one thing before his voice dropped too low to catch.

Three words spoken to whoever was waiting on the other end of that call.

"She said yes."

Like he had never had a single doubt.