Chapter One
I paced the length of Donovan’s office, then checked my watch for the third time in as many minutes. She wasn’t late yet, but there was a boulder of doubt in my stomach that had me sure she wouldn’t come at all. It was a natural assumption after last time. How long had I waited that night? At what point had I known for sure that she was going to ghost?
I’d been more optimistic then. I’d waited hours. Now I relied on experience. If she were planning to show at all, the Jolie I’d known would have been early.
But I hadn’t known her for a long, long time.
And the name was Julianna, not Jolie. No one called her Jolie but me, and I refused to call her that now. She didn’t deserve it. In the week since I’d gotten her email, I’d practiced it over and over. Julianna, Julianna, Julianna. She wasn’t Jolie anymore. Jolie disappeared the night I waited for her in a run-down pickup in the parking lot of a CTown Supermarket. Jolie was gone.
Again, I checked my watch. Not even thirty seconds had passed. Time was moving at a snail’s pace. I cracked my neck from side to side before loosening my tie. I’d already taken off the jacket, and I was still sweating. It was a Saturday in December, for fuck’s sake, and I was the only one in the Reach office. Did the guys keep the heater on over the weekends? No wonder the New York overhead was so high.
I crossed to the thermostat and was surprised to find it was actually set at an arctic temperature that only an asshole penny-pincher would have thought was acceptable, which made sense because Donovan and I were alike in that area. When we’d worked the office together in Tokyo, we’d had the trimmest budget of all the Reach locations. It had risen a bit when he’d moved to the States since I no longer had the time to keep a close eye on it. I hadn’t really examined the New York numbers in a while, but I had a feeling they’d probably improved with his presence.
Regardless of company spending and the perspiration beading on my forehead, the current setting was not all that friendly. I’d be a bad host to leave it there. I considered doing just that before begrudgingly switching the heater on full blast. Hopefully, it would do something before Jolie showed up.
Not Jolie.
Julianna.
Fuck, this was a giant mistake. This whole thing. I shouldn’t have opened the email. I shouldn’t have responded. I shouldn’t have told her I was going to be in New York for a wedding that I’d had no prior plans to attend. I most definitely shouldn’t have dropped everything, boarded a plane, and flown halfway across the world to impatiently pace Donovan’s office, waiting for her to show. Especially knowing she had a record for not showing.
If I’d been intent on justice, I would have ghosted her this time.
But it wasn’t justice I needed most from Julianna Stark. It was closure. And that’s why I was there—for me, not for her. And so help me God, if she’d stood me up again…
I forced myself to sit on the edge of the desk. It wasn’t exactly a relaxed position, but it was better than wearing a hole in the carpet. Still antsy, I pulled out my phone and reread her email, even though I could recite it by heart without looking.
Cade,
I know I have no right to reach out to you like this, but there’s no one else I can turn to...
My gaze skipped down to her signature. She’d used the name I refused to call her. The one meant to tug at my emotions. Fuck her for that. Fuck her for all of it.
My agitation renewed, I stuffed my phone back in my pocket and took a deep breath. I refused to be riled up when she got here. With my palms settled on my thighs, I traced the tattoos on the back of my hands with my eyes. It was a trick I’d taught myself a decade or so ago, back when the pressure of some of my bigger jobs got the best of me, and I needed something to help me focus. I hadn’t had to use it since going into business with Donovan and the guys. Advertising was definitely a high-stress career, but it was legit, and that made it a walk in the park compared to what I’d done before.
The trick still worked. By the fifth sweep of my eyes along the inked skin, I was breathing more regularly, and even though the heat had kicked in, I was feeling cool enough to reach for my jacket.
Just as I fastened the button of the navy blue Armani, I heard the ding of the elevator arriving. Then the sound of two sets of footsteps clicking on marble flooring echoed through the hallway.
She was here.
Fuck. She was here, and I was going to keep it together, whatever it took.
I ran my hand over my beard, straightened my tie, then with a final curse under my breath, I clicked the button that turned the glass wall from opaque to transparent and moved to stand in front of it.
There wasn’t a direct path to the elevators from Donovan’s office, so I had to wait until the pair turned down the corridor, and then it was Fran that I saw first, the security guard that I’d tipped a hundred in exchange for personally walking my guest to the back office. Was it necessary? Probably not. I told myself I was being hospitable. Truth was, I didn’t want to be alone when we first saw each other.
And when Jolie—I’d given up on calling her Julianna in my head—followed Fran around the corner, I knew I’d made the right choice because, even with her head bent and her eyes fixed on the floor, Jolie was a lodestone, and I was fighting really hard not to be iron. If it had been just the two of us, I wasn’t sure I would have been able to resist her pull.
I wasn’t sure I’d be able to resist her pull even with Fran between us.
Thank God for the glass wall.
Showing up now doesn’t make up for not showing up back then.
In case that wasn’t enough of a reminder, I forced myself to remember what had happened when I’d gone after her. My ribs hurt with the vividness of that memory. My shoulder throbbed where the bone had once been broken. My chest ached with the pain of a fractured heart.
And just like that, her pull on me diminished.
“I think she has it from here, Fran,” I called out. The glass was between us, but the office door was open, so I could be heard. “Thank you.”
At the sound of my voice, both women came to a halt. Fran had already been looking at me, but my gaze settled past her, watching as Jolie’s head lifted, her eyes swiftly meeting mine, and much as I told myself not to look for anything from the past in her face, I immediately saw the girl she’d been back then. Her cheekbones were sharper, sure. Her curves were more filled out, her naturally dark hair had been dyed blonde and cut to her shoulders, and I hadn’t remembered her eyes being so light, and yet, I would have recognized her anywhere.
So much for convincing myself she was someone new.
“Sure, sure,” Fran said with a tone that said she was positive she hadn’t earned the generous tip I’d given. She lingered a couple of seconds, as though trying to decide if she should give the money back or make peace with the unbalance. “Tell you what—you let me know when you’re on your way out, and I’ll come back up for a thorough sweep and set the alarm for you.”
“Will do.” I could turn the alarm on and off with the push of a button on my phone, but if it made her feel good enough to leave, then fine. I’d wanted her there as a buffer, but the foolishness of that notion was clearly evident. Now as then, when Jolie was in the room, the only person I saw was her.
Her gaze seemed just as intent to stay locked on mine.
Seconds passed like hours. Vaguely, I was aware of Fran turning around, of the clop, clop, clop of her footsteps as she made her way back to the elevator. The ding of its arrival had sounded and gone silent before either Jolie or I said a word.
“Hi.” She was the one who spoke first because I was a fucking chickenshit, though even through the glass, I could hear a rasp in her voice that said this likely wasn’t easy for her either.
I cleared my throat as if I could clear the scratch in hers for her. “I’m sure you’ll be more comfortable sitting down.” I gestured for her to join me. It was smugly satisfying that she had to be the one to walk to me.
Her plump lips curved down, and she nodded, as though realizing the tone of this meeting had been set and with that nod she’d accepted it. “Yes. Sitting down for this is probably best.”
The disappointment in her tone was jarring—apparently I hated it as much now as I had then—and for the briefest of moments, I wished I’d said something else, something more inviting, something sentimental.
But then I told myself to fuck that regret. This wasn’t a nostalgic reunion. This was an ending, and the sooner we got to her asking for her favor, the sooner that conclusion would come.
I knew that, yet as she walked toward me with the same brisk energy she’d had when we were younger, I found myself wishing she would slow down so I could stretch this moment to its limits. It had to last forever. It had to make up for so much lost time.
Fuck, I was in trouble.
Disgusted with myself, I moved away from the glass and had made it to the bar by the time she came in. “Have a seat,” I said, busying myself with empty glasses. “Can I get you something to drink?”
“Water would be fine.”
I opened the mini fridge, happy to have an excuse to keep my back to her. “Sparkling or still?”
“Either.”
I grabbed a bottle of sparkling for her and abandoned my impulse to pour a whiskey for myself. I needed to keep a clear head.
But then I had to get close enough to her to hand her the water, and suddenly I regretted not having the alcohol.
She’d taken her coat off and draped it on the back of the chair with her purse, but she was still standing, despite my invitation to sit, which somehow made it worse when I crossed to her. I would have preferred looming above her. I would have preferred to not have to look her in the eye. And though I purposely made sure we didn’t have physical contact, I could feel the spark between us all the same, as though she was lightning and the bottle between our fingers was a rod, and every part of my body lit up like the Christmas tree in the building lobby.
I let go immediately and took a step back.
“Thanks.” She didn’t open the bottle. I stared where her fingers wrapped around the cylinder shape, noting the lack of a ring where one should be if she were married. That was satisfying, at least.
Except a bare finger didn’t necessarily mean anything, and I didn’t care about her marital status, and I definitely didn’t want her thinking I did, so I pushed my eyes up to hers where I found her attention was completely on me. She took in every change in my appearance—the beard, the tats, the muscular build I’d worked for in my twenties, the hard expression that was permanently etched on my face. “You look good,” she said finally.
I didn’t look good. I was jet-lagged and haggard, but when she said it, I believed her because that was just what I’d always done, and old habits die hard. “You look the same.”
She made a noise that could almost be called a laugh. “I don’t, but thank you.”
I shrugged, not sure how else to respond. She did look the same, in all the ways that mattered, and that was a real fucking problem for me. It kept me looking at her when I should have been looking anywhere else. It kept me standing within arm’s reach when I should have been stepping away.
“I’m underdressed,” she said, looking down at her jeans and sweater. It was definitely more casual than anything she’d ever worn as a teenager, but we’d spent most of those days in a school uniform, and her father dictated what she wore the rest of the time, so it was impossible to know what her true style would have been.
It fit her, I realized. Fit who I’d imagined her to have grown up to be, someone who didn’t try to impress anyone. Someone who dressed for practicality and comfort. Someone who didn’t care about anyone else’s opinion.
Except maybe she cared about mine because she seemed to be seeking reassurance. While I didn’t care about making her feel better, the comment begged a response. “You’re dressed appropriately for the weather.”
“I didn’t expect to see you all decked out in a suit.”
“I have a wedding after this,” I reminded her. A wedding I wasn’t going to make it to since it started in twenty minutes. But I hadn’t really ever planned on going anyway.
“Oh, yeah. That’s right.” Instead of taking that as a cue to hurry this along and sit down, she scanned the room and strolled toward one of the bookcases. Immediately, she found the one picture on Donovan’s shelf that included me. She smiled as she leaned in to study it, and fuck if that smile didn’t do something profound to my insides. Like her lips were razor blades cutting through the darkest parts of me, letting in sunshine that had no business brightening the gloom.
I willed myself to shut it out.
And still I found myself standing behind her, looking at the image over her shoulder, trying to imagine what it was she saw that she thought deserved that grin. It was of the five of us guys—Donovan, Weston, Nate, and Dylan—all of us dressed in our best suits and puffing cigars.
“I never pictured you as a cigar smoker,” she said.
Probably because I’d been a cigarette smoker when she’d known me. I’d quit more than a decade ago, but strangely I found myself jonesing for a cigarette now. Funny how people from the past brought you back to the person you were when you knew them.
I wondered if she’d quit as well or if she had a pack buried in that oversized purse of hers. It was tempting to ask just to have her dig it out and hand it over, just to feel my lips on something that she’d touched.
“We were celebrating,” I said, trying to rein in my wandering mind.
“Celebrating what?”
“The opening of this office.”
“Was this the first location you opened? You said you were in Tokyo.”
I found the words spilling out before I could stop them. “We planned to have three locations from the beginning. New York opened first, then Tokyo three months later, and London a few months after that.”
“A global phenomenon.” She sounded proud, and I liked that.
I hated it at the same time. She had no right to be proud of me. She had no right to care how I’d turned out. She had no right to smell the way she did—familiar and new all at once, a scent that made my head cloud and my pulse race and my chest feel like it was breaking in two.
She turned her head toward me, and we were so close I could make out the spattering of freckles on her cheeks, the ones she’d always hated. The ones that formed a constellation in my sleep. “I always knew you’d end up someone important,” she whispered.
I had been someone important. I’d been hers.
And that hadn’t been enough for her.
Abruptly, I moved back. “How about you tell me what it is you need from me, Julianna?” I said her name pointedly, proud that I hadn’t tripped over it when it crossed my lips.
She turned to face me, her tongue sweeping across her lower lip. “Actually, it’s Jolie now. I didn’t change it legally, but I may as well have. It’s what I go by.”
As difficult as it was to think of her by any other name, this new bit of info pissed me off. Unreasonably so. I’d been the only one to call her that once upon a time, and while I didn’t expect to still get to indulge in that honor, I sure as hell wasn’t happy about discovering that the honor now belonged to everyone.
I definitely wasn’t calling her that now. “Whatever you want to go by, I have that wedding to get to, so if we could hurry this along…”
“Right. Sorry.” She still had that ability to close off in an instant. Like someone pulling down the blinds. One minute you could see deep inside her, the next she was shut up tight.
For the best, I reminded myself.
But damn if I didn’t need a cigarette.
She walked past me and sat primly on the edge of the chair, the way her father had always professed that proper young ladies should sit, her hands laid casually in her lap. I followed after her, circling behind the desk, but instead of sitting, I stood, my arms folded over my chest, a posture her father would most certainly have found disrespectful.
It was a belligerent stance on my part, one that Langdon Stark probably deserved more than she did, but in a lot of ways, Jolie and her father were inseparable in my mind. The complicated feelings I had for one of them more often than not extended toward the other.
Except that I’d never loved Headmaster Stark. That emotion had belonged to Jolie alone. Still did, I supposed, since there hadn’t been anyone I’d said the word to since her.
Which was why I needed closure.
I nodded toward her, a silent prompt to get on with it.
“You probably want to be sitting for this,” she suggested.
“I’m fine like I am.”
“All right.” She let out a sigh. “I, um. I need to ask you for your help.”
She hesitated, so I prodded her on. “Something only I can help with, you said. I have to be honest—I’m curious. It’s hard for me to believe I’m the only one you can turn to when I haven’t seen or heard from you in close to two decades. Surely there are other men you’ve strung along since me. What could this favor possibly be?”
The barb did the trick. She stopped hedging and spit it out. “I need you to help me kill my father.”
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