CHAPTER 3:THE BOY WHO BROKE ME

The champagne was too sweet, the way it always was at Carter events, and Maya remembered laughing anyway, head tipped back, Damien's arm sliding around her waist like it belonged there.

"You're staring," he murmured against her ear, two years ago, a lifetime ago, in a ballroom dripping with chandeliers and old money. "Everyone's staring at you, actually. I love watching them figure out I got here first."

"Careful," she'd said, breathless with the kind of happiness that felt bottomless at the time. "That almost sounded romantic."

"I contain multitudes."

She'd believed him. That was the part that still burned, two years later, standing in her bathroom with her makeup bag open on the counter and her hands not quite steady enough to apply eyeliner. Not that he'd lied to her — people lied, that was survivable — but that she'd believed every word of it so completely she hadn't seen the ground giving way beneath her until she was already falling.

Maya set the eyeliner down and gripped the edge of the sink.

Focus, she told herself. You have three hours. Get ready. Figure out what you're walking into.

But the memories had their own momentum once she let the first one in, and they came now in a current she couldn't quite swim against — Damien laughing at some private joke with his cousins, Damien's hand warm at the small of her back guiding her through rooms full of people who mattered, Damien saying her name like it was something worth saying.

And underneath all of it, one comment she'd barely registered at the time, tossed off so casually she'd almost missed it.

They'd been lying in bed, the city glittering through his apartment window, and she'd asked — the way you ask about someone's family when you're young enough to think the answer will just be interesting rather than a warning — about his uncle. The one everyone gets quiet about.

"Elias doesn't do relationships," Damien had said, staring at the ceiling. "He doesn't do anything, honestly. He just watches. Waits. It's unsettling, if I'm being honest."

"Sounds lonely," she'd said.

"Sounds like Elias."

She hadn't thought about that conversation in two years. It surfaced now with a clarity that made her stomach turn — not because of what Damien said, but because of how offhandedly he'd said it, like Elias Carter was a fact of weather rather than a man, something you simply worked around.

The only person in this family scarier than my father.

He'd said that too, once, at a different party, drunk enough to be honest. She'd laughed it off then. She wasn't laughing now.

Maya splashed cold water on her face and made herself breathe. This was insane. She was standing here, hours away from walking into a building owned by the family that had spent two years quietly demolishing her career, dredging up a two-year-old relationship like it held some kind of key, like the boy who broke her heart could possibly explain the man who'd just offered to fix her life with a single phone call.

He knew things about me. Things I never told Damien.

That was the detail that wouldn't let her go. Not the sabotaged interviews, not the vague threats, not even the unsettling calm in Elias's voice. It was the certainty underneath everything he'd said — the sense that he'd been watching her, or knowing about her, for far longer than one phone call would suggest.

She finished her makeup on autopilot, throwing on a blazer that made her feel more armored than she actually was, and caught her reflection fully dressed for the first time since the interview that morning.

She didn't recognize the woman staring back.

Not because she looked different — the same dark hair, the same stubborn set of her jaw she'd inherited from a mother who'd raised her alone and never apologized for the sharp edges it left behind — but because of what was in her eyes. Fear, yes. But something else too, something she hadn't let herself feel in two years: the electric, dangerous pull of wanting to know.

Her phone buzzed on the counter, breaking the moment.

She glanced down, expecting Viv, expecting a reminder about dinner plans she'd need to cancel, expecting anything except what actually greeted her — an unknown number, a single attachment, no message.

She opened it before she could think better of it.

A photograph filled the screen. Herself, from yesterday, walking out of the interview that had fallen apart, captured mid-stride on the sidewalk outside the building, her expression caught somewhere between fury and heartbreak. The angle was wrong for a passerby's photo — too deliberate, too composed, taken from across the street with the kind of patience that meant someone had been waiting for her to come out.

Maya's blood went cold.

She hadn't told anyone about that interview except Viv. She certainly hadn't told Elias Carter, not until hours later, on a call he'd initiated.

Which meant someone had been watching her before he ever picked up the phone.

Her hands, steady only a moment ago, began to shake again — and this time, there was no mistaking it for curiosity.