chapter one

The morning light filtered through silk curtains worth more than most people's cars, casting pale gold across Elias Vale's bedroom. He'd been awake for an hour, lying motionless in Egyptian cotton sheets, staring at the ornate ceiling molding and feeling like an imposter in his own life.

Twenty-three years old, and he still couldn't shake the sensation that he was a guest in the Vale mansion. That someone would eventually knock on the door and ask him to leave.

His phone buzzed on the nightstand. A message from his mother: Family breakfast at 8. Your presence is expected.

Expected. Never requested. Never desired. Just expected, like the fresh flowers in every room and the staff who materialized silently to fulfill needs before they were spoken.

Elias showered in the bathroom that could have housed a small family, dressed in clothes that carried designers' names he'd never learned to pronounce correctly, and made his way downstairs. The mansion was a monument to wealth he hadn't earned, his mother had married into it when he was seventeen, bringing her quiet son into the gleaming world of the Vales like an afterthought accessory.

The breakfast room overlooked the manicured gardens, where a team of landscapers were already at work despite the early hour. His mother, Catherine, sat with perfect posture at one end of the table, her coffee cup held just so. His stepfather, Richard Vale, read the financial section of the newspaper, his silence more commanding than most people's conversations.

"Good morning," Elias said, taking his seat.

"Elias." His mother offered a thin smile. "You look tired."

"I'm fine."

"You should get more sun. You're so pale lately."

He poured coffee from the silver service, saying nothing. What would he tell her? That he lay awake most nights feeling like he was suffocating? That the wealth surrounding him felt like a beautiful prison? That he was struggling with questions about himself he couldn't begin to voice?

"Alexander won't be joining us," Richard said without looking up from his paper. "Again."

Catherine's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. "I'm sure he had a late night."

"Clearly." Richard folded the paper with deliberate precision, revealing the tabloid section he'd been concealing. The headline screamed across the top: VALE HEIR'S YACHT PARTY TURNS WILD—THREE MODELS, ONE NIGHT.

The photographs were exactly what Elias expected. Alexander, his stepbrother, golden and disheveled in the Mediterranean sun, surrounded by beautiful women in bikinis, champagne flowing, that careless smile that seemed to mock the very concept of consequences.

Elias's chest constricted in a way he'd learned not to examine too closely.

"It's unseemly," Catherine murmured, though whether she meant the behavior or the publicity, Elias couldn't tell.

"It's Alexander," Richard said, and somehow that explained everything. His biological son, the heir to the Vale fortune, the one who'd been born into this world rather than married into it. The one who wore wealth like a second skin and treated desire like a game with no stakes.

Elias hated him. Or told himself he did. It was easier than admitting the complicated knot of feelings that tightened whenever Alexander entered a room.

"He's twenty-eight years old," Richard continued. "He'll settle down eventually. They all do."

Elias doubted that. Alexander seemed constitutionally incapable of settling, of being still, of being anything other than what he was—excessive, reckless, somehow untouchable despite the scandals that would have destroyed anyone else.

Breakfast continued in near silence, punctuated only by the soft clink of silverware and his mother's occasional comments about charity events and social obligations. Elias responded when required, his mind elsewhere, trapped in the familiar loop of wondering how much longer he could maintain this careful performance of normalcy.

By the time he retreated to his room, the sun had fully risen, and he felt exhausted despite having done nothing at all.

He tried to work—he was technically enrolled in online business courses, another expectation he was failing to meet with any enthusiasm. But the words on his laptop screen blurred into meaninglessness. He kept thinking about the photograph, about Alexander's casual abandon, about the freedom of living so openly, so shamelessly.

What would that feel like? To want something and simply take it? To not constantly calculate the cost of every choice, every word, every visible emotion?

The hours passed slowly. Elias declined lunch, claiming he wasn't hungry. In truth, he couldn't bear another meal of careful conversation and things left unsaid. He spent the afternoon in the library, surrounded by books no one read, in a house full of rooms no one used, feeling invisible and somehow too exposed at the same time.

It was nearly dawn the next morning when Elias heard the car in the driveway.

He'd been awake again, sitting by his window, watching the night fade to grey. The black sports car—Alexander's, unmistakable, pulled up to the main entrance with careless speed. The door opened, and Alexander emerged, still wearing last night's clothes, wrinkled and loose. His dark hair was a mess, his shirt half-unbuttoned.

Even from this distance, Elias could see the satisfied exhaustion on his face. The look of someone who'd indulged in everything he wanted and suffered no regrets.

Alexander paused before entering, tilting his head back to look at the sky as it slowly lightened. There was something in his posture—a momentary stillness, that seemed at odds with everything else about him. As if, for just a second, the performance had dropped.

Then he moved, and the moment vanished. He walked toward the entrance with that familiar confidence, every step an assertion of belonging.

Elias remained at his window, unable to look away, feeling something twist painfully in his chest. Something he couldn't name and wouldn't examine. Something that felt dangerously close to longing.

He pressed his palm flat against the cool glass, watching Alexander disappear into the house, into the life he'd been born to, the freedom Elias could only observe from a distance.

The tightness in his chest intensified, a feeling he'd become practiced at ignoring. He turned away from the window, as the image of Alexander burned into his mind.

Some things, Elias had learned, were better left unexamined.

He climbed back into bed, closed his eyes, and waited for sleep that wouldn't come.