Chapter Seven: The First Move

I barely made it to my room.

The door clicked shut behind me and I locked it, my fingers fumbling with the deadbolt twice before it finally caught.

Then my legs gave out and I slid down against the wood, my back hitting it hard.

 I stayed there on the cold floor with my knees pulled to my chest.

My whole body was shaking, not from the cold but from the adrenaline still pumping through me.

I could still remember the way my father's hand had hung in the air between us and the way Margot's voice had cut through the silence with a single sharp word.  

“Don't hit her. It'll leave marks and that won't look good,”

 Arthur had lowered his hand like a dog being called to heel but his eyes had stayed on me the entire time, and the message in them was clear enough without words.

I pressed my forehead against my knees and breathed slowly. I sat there for a long time, waiting for the trembling to stop.

At some point the house went silent around me.

No more footsteps in the hallway. No more muffled conversation drifting up the stairs.

They thought I was in here falling apart, crying and caving under the weight of it all the way I always had before.

I lifted my head slowly and stared at the desk across the room where my laptop sat closed and waiting.

My mind had been turning the entire time I sat on that floor. My family wanted me silent and grateful and easy to manage. They had spent years building that version of me.

They'd been shaping me into someone who would never push back, never question, never ask for anything more than what they chose to give.

They had no idea what I was capable of now.

I pulled myself up off the floor.

My ankle throbbed with each step as I crossed the room. I sat down at the desk and opened the laptop and the screen cast a pale glow across my face in the dark.

My hands were steady now. The shaking was gone entirely.

I typed the name into the search bar.

Thorne Industries.

The results filled the screen instantly. Dozens of articles from business publications and financial news outlets.

Headlines about quarterly earnings and corporate expansion and charity work.

 Photos of glass office towers and boardrooms lined with expensive suits.

Callum Thorne's name appeared in nearly every one of them, always attached to words like “visionary” and “self-made” and “youngest billionaire.”

I scrolled past all of it. I wasn't looking for his success story. I was looking for the cracks.

It took me three pages before I found it – a short piece buried in a financial newsletter, dated two weeks ago.

The language was careful, written with phrases like “sources suggest” and “growing concerns among key investors.”

 But the meaning was obvious if you knew what to look for. The board was fractured. A critical partnership was quietly falling apart.

The ground beneath Thorne Industries was shifting, and most people hadn't noticed yet.

I remembered this. Every single piece of it. In my previous life, this crisis had exploded within three weeks.  

 Callum had fought it. He had fought it hard, throwing everything he had at it, and in the end he found a way through but nearly cost him everything.

I already knew the way through. I had watched it happen once before.

I clicked on his profile photo from a business magazine spread. The image filled half my screen and I leaned forward, studying his face in the blue light of the laptop.

I stared at his dark eyes.

The same eyes that had looked down at me in that hospital corridor.

The man from the hospital. The one who caught me when I stumbled.

I sat back in my chair as the recognition settled through me

. I had been too disoriented that day to put it together, too consumed by the shock of waking up alive and a year in the past but now I understood exactly who he was and exactly why he mattered.

Callum Thorne.

I needed protection from my family. I needed money, resources, a way out of this house that couldn't be taken back.

I needed leverage strong enough that Arthur and Margot couldn't touch me without consequences.

And Callum Thorne needed someone who could save his company from a crisis he didn't even know was coming.

A transaction. Something that gave us both exactly what we needed.

A fake marriage.

I closed the laptop with a quiet click and the room went dark again.

I sat there for a moment, perfectly still, letting the plan settle into place in my mind like pieces fitting together.

Tomorrow I would figure out how to reach him. I would find a way to get in front of him and make him listen.

Tonight, though, the house had other plans for me.

The voices came through the wall first. It was low and muffled, like they were coming from somewhere far away, but I knew exactly where they were.

They were in the guest room, right next door.

I heard Declan's deep voice, saying something I couldn't quite make out through the plaster.

Then Sienna's soft laugh, the kind of laugh that meant she was exactly where she wanted to be.

They weren't being careful or maybe they simply didn't care.

I sat in the dark and listened, and I felt nothing at all.