Liam’s POV:
The report arrived quietly—no warning, no fanfare, just a name in the subject line that sent a cold ripple through my spine the second I saw it.
Sinclaire, Avelina.
I didn’t move at first, just stared at the screen like I already knew what it contained, as if some part of me had been waiting for this confirmation, waiting for reality to catch up with instinct.
I opened the file and started reading.
Her name unfolded first—full, elegant, bloodline-heavy. And then the rest came like a slow knife: the upbringing, the circles she’d moved in, the engagement, the scandal. The pieces clicked into place one after another with surgical clarity until I couldn’t pretend it was just coincidence anymore.
Jeremy Callahan wasn’t some peripheral figure in her past. He was the past. The carefully orchestrated engagement, the political merger disguised as a love match, the betrayal so public it made headlines Ava had clearly spent every day since trying to outrun.
She wasn’t hiding because she was a coward. She was hiding because she had survived humiliation, abandonment, and every smug whisper from a world that demanded she smile and thank them for it.
And suddenly, all of her made sense.
The fierceness. The defensiveness. The way she spoke like she had something to prove, and the way she burned when she thought she’d made a mistake. The biting intellect that flared whenever someone underestimated her. She hadn’t just lied to me—she had rewritten herself from scratch to escape a life that no one would’ve blamed her for staying in, and that made her braver than I’d given her credit for.
And God, I wanted her.
I wanted her in since the first time she’d opened her mouth in my interview room and told me she was the hardest worker I’d ever meet. I wanted her even before she kissed me back like she didn’t care that we were toeing the line of every workplace violation on the books. I wanted her now more than ever—now that I understood where the cracks in her armor came from.
And I hated that.
I hated the way she’d gotten under my skin.
Because I was the one who was supposed to be untouchable. Unshakable. The one who made people flinch when I walked into the room, not the one chasing shadows of a woman who refused to tell me her real name.
But now I couldn’t stop thinking about her.
Not just her mouth, or the way she tasted when she lost control. I wanted to know what her life had looked like before she burned it down. I wanted to know what she’d been forced to give up. What she was still afraid of. I wanted to know how someone so sharp could still flinch when she was cornered, and why it made me want to destroy anything that ever made her feel that way.
I was still staring at the report when my phone rang.
My father.
I considered ignoring it. I even picked it up and hovered my thumb over the red button. But then I answered, because with him, ignoring wasn’t avoidance—it was invitation.
“What,” I said flatly.
“There’s one more,” he said, voice all business, like he hadn’t been dragging me through a parade of useless matches for the better part of a decade.
“One more what?”
“Potential bride.”
I exhaled slowly, closing my laptop. “We agreed we were done with this.”
“No. I said if you passed on this one, I’d stop interfering. And I will. But this is the last one. One meeting. You show up, listen, smile, shake her father’s hand. Say no, and I’ll walk away.”
“Why the hell should I believe that now?”
“You always say you want control. This is how you get it. After this, no more meddling. But you have to meet her.”
I waited.
“Who is she?”
There was a pause.
“You’ll find out tomorrow. Noon. Valencia Hotel.”
He hung up.
Of course he did.
I set the phone down, leaned back in my chair, and stared out the window at the city I had bent to my will. Everything in this office, this company, this life—I had built it on the ruins of the expectations he tried to chain me to. Every match he arranged, I dismantled. Every woman he paraded in front of me, I sent running. But this one—this mystery woman—was his last play. His final gamble.
And still, all I could think about was the girl already in my building.