Chapter 2

Ezra’s POV

“You know her, don’t you, sir?” said Idan.

I didn’t answer.

We stood in the service corridor of the Ashwood Hotel, behind a door marked STAFF ONLY, twenty feet from a family coming apart. Idan Katz, my chief of staff, held a tablet in one hand and a paper cup of coffee in the other. He is thirty-four, thin and sharp, with rimless glasses and the unbothered face of a man who has never once been surprised. He has worked for me for nine years.

At that moment he looked very close to it.

“You froze,” he said. “In the doorway. I’ve never seen you freeze.”

“I didn’t freeze.”

“Your hand went to your wallet.”

I looked down. My right hand was flat against my breast pocket, thumb pressed into the folded leather. It’s a habit. I had done it so many times since I was eighteen that the edge of the pocket had worn thin.

I took my hand away.

“Get me the security footage,” I said. “From the penthouse corridor. From the bar, from the elevators, from ten p.m. last night until now. Everything.”

“On what authority?”

“I’m about to buy the hotel.”

“You’re about to buy the Sterling company. Not the hotel.”

“Then I’ll buy the hotel.”

Idan sipped his coffee. His eyebrows rose a quarter of an inch, which for him is a shout. “That was a joke.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Right.” He tapped the tablet. “I’ll have it in an hour.”

~

Five weeks ago, I sat at the end of a bar in Belltown with a whiskey I didn’t want and a thick folder I couldn’t stop reading.

The Copper Door is a small, dark, wet-looking place with a tin ceiling and six stools. It was raining. It had been raining for nine days. I’d flown into Seattle that morning to spend a week going through Sterling Fragrance House line by line, and I had a bad feeling about every number in that folder.

At two in the morning, a woman sat down two stools away.

She was small and dark-haired, in a gray coat, with her hair dripping. She ordered a hot tea. She didn’t look at me. I don’t think she saw me at all. She wrapped both hands around the cup and shut her eyes.

And I smelled her.

I’m not a man who notices scent. But a scent came off her like a warm window on a cold street. Orange blossom, bitter and green, and rain, and a faint sweet skin note under it, like clean paper. I looked up.

“That’s neroli,” I said, before I could stop myself.

She opened her eyes.

“I’m sorry?”

“You smell like neroli. And petitgrain. Green stems.” I felt like an idiot. “I don’t know why I said that.”

She stared at me. Then, slowly, she smiled. Small, startled, and so unguarded that it went into my chest like a hook.

“Nobody’s ever got that right,” she said. “Not without asking.”

“What do you do?”

“I make perfume.” She took a sip. “You?”

“I buy companies.”

“That sounds lonely.”

“It is.”

She laughed. She hadn’t expected it, and neither had I.

We talked until the bar closed. I don’t remember what about, only how. She didn’t perform. She didn’t ask me for anything. She told me she’d lost her mother at twelve, that she’d grown up in a house where she was a guest, that she loved her work more than any person alive and would never say so out loud. She told me she was asking questions no one wanted answered, and that she was tired.

I told her my name was Ezra.

“Ezra what?”

“Just Ezra.”

“Then I’m Aya.”

Just Aya. She didn’t give me a last name either.

When the barman put the chairs up, we stepped out into the rain, and she said, “I don’t do this,” and I said, “Neither do I,” and it was true.

The rain turned the streets of Belltown to black mirrors, but the inside of my hotel suite was a furnace the second the heavy oak door clicked shut.

I didn't turn on a single light. The wet skyline filtered through the floor-to-ceiling glass, casting long, bruised shadows across the hardwood and turning the damp strands of her dark hair to spun ink. She smelled like raw, rain-soaked neroli and green petitgrain, an intoxicating cocktail that tore through whatever control I’d spent decades building in boardroom negotiations.

Aya didn't wait. Her hands came up to my chest, slipping inside my tailored coat, peeling it off my shoulders and letting it drop heavily to the rug.

"You talk too much for a man who buys companies," she breathed, her voice a rough, breathless purr. She reached for my tie, loosening the silk knot with fingers that trembled with sheer, unmasked hunger.

"I don't plan on talking anymore," I rasped, gripping her waist and lifting her clean off the floor.

Her thighs wrapped around my hips instantly, the damp fabric of her gray coat parting to reveal bare, silky legs that clamped tight around my lower back. I walked her backward until her spine hit the velvet settee by the window. I stripped her coat away in one brutal, impatient heave, tossing it aside, before tearing the dark knit sweater over her head.

She wasn't wearing a bra. Her breasts were round, pale as marble in the ambient city glow, her dark, tight nipples already pebbled and weeping from the sudden draft.

"Fuck, you're magnificent," I groaned, kneeling between her parted knees on the rug.

I didn't give her time to gather her breath. I shoved my trousers and briefs down to my ankles.

I stayed buried to the hilt, trembling violently, holding her against my chest as our ragged, heavy breaths mingled with the sound of the rain beating relentlessly against the glass.

I woke at five, in my suite, with her asleep against my shoulder and gray light in the curtains.

Her bag sat on the chair. It had fallen open in the night. A white lanyard hung out of it, with a plastic badge on the end, face up.

I don’t know why I looked. I shouldn’t have.

STERLING FRAGRANCE HOUSE. A. RIVERS. SENIOR PERFUMER.

I have never in my life been so cold.

I read the name three times. Then I got up, very quietly, and dressed in the dark, and stood by the door with my hand on the handle and my heart going like a hammer. I looked back at her. She stirred and murmured a word in her sleep. I couldn’t make it out.

I left.

I told myself I’d call. I told myself it was too much, too fast, too strange. I told myself I would work it out.

I didn’t have her number. I didn’t have her last name until it was on a badge. And by the time I’d sat in my car for an hour with my forehead on the wheel, I’d decided the most decent thing I could do was stay away.

I have regretted it every day since.

~

Idan came back in fifty-one minutes.

“I have it,” he said. “All of it. And I think you should sit.”

“I’ll stand.”

“Fine.” He set the tablet on a linen cart. “Ten thirty last night. Bar on the fourteenth floor. The Sterling girl, Ilana, at the counter with two glasses of champagne. She has her back to the room. She takes a small vial from her clutch and tips it into one glass.” His finger slid across the screen. “She hands it to your Miss Rivers with a smile.”

I watched.

A grainy, silent picture. Aya, in green silk, taking the glass from her sister’s hand. Laughing. Lifting it to her lips.

My jaw locked.

“Eleven thirty,” Idan said. “Elevator. Aya Rivers leaning on the wall, unsteady. Two men from hotel security guide her out on the twenty-ninth. They’re paid, sir. I checked. Sterling Trust. Cash. At twelve, Eitan Blake, the fiancé, is carried up by the same two. He’s out cold too. They put him on the bed beside her.” Idan’s voice thinned. “Then Ilana Sterling makes a phone call. She says the words, It’s done.”

“To whom?”

“Her mother.”

I said nothing.

“Sir.” Idan adjusted his glasses. “There’s more. I ran the Rivers name. She was a housekeeper’s daughter, taken in by Elliot Sterling at twelve. But her mother wasn’t a housekeeper. Hannah Rivers was Head Nose at Sterling for eleven years. She died fourteen years ago, at the Sterling estate in Medina. The cause of death is cardiac arrest. Natural causes. The file is sealed by private order. Signed by Elliot Sterling’s own lawyer.”

The corridor hummed. Somewhere down the hall, a cart squeaked past.

I put my hand on my breast pocket.

Inside my wallet, folded small, is a photograph. It’s old and soft at the corners. In it, a laughing man in a lab coat stands next to a dark-haired woman at a workbench, both with their sleeves rolled up, holding a small glass bottle up to the light.

The man is my father.

The woman is Hannah Rivers.

“Sir?” said Idan.

“I’ve been looking for her daughter for fourteen years,” I said.