I holed up in my apartment and ignored all my calls, texts, and emails for two whole days. They were relentless—my family, my friends, the media. Some meant well, others less so. Regardless, I couldn’t scrounge up the energy to face any of them.
The only time I interacted with the outside world was through my work with Alessandra, who thankfully kept our exchanges professional and didn’t ask about the National Star revelations. After the identity reveal, the tabloid continued publishing articles and rumors, most of which were blatant lies.
I went to rehab for a cocaine addiction (I’d volunteered there during college). I’d slept with previous employers to get hired (they fucking wished). I had an orgy with an entire MLB team after the World Series a few years back (I served them during their celebratory night out and had one round of drinks with them).
The claims were so ridiculous I dismissed them out of hand. If someone was gullible enough to think I had a secret orgy-induced love child stowed away in Canada, that was their problem.
However, the truths were much harder to swallow.
Other than a string of short-lived bartending stints and even shorter-lived odd jobs, she has embarrassingly few accomplishments to her name…
Heiress or not, she’s far from his usual Ivy League-educated type.
Nausea curdled my stomach.
I tucked one hand beneath my thigh and bounced my knee as Kai returned from his kitchen with two mugs of tea.
Dark circles shadowed his eyes, and his normally neat hair was tousled, like he’d run his fingers through it one too many times. Tension bracketed his mouth and lined the broad planes of his shoulders.
My heart wrung itself at his obvious exhaustion.
He’d returned to New York that afternoon and texted me asking to meet. It was the first time we’d spoken since the latest round of National Star hits, which didn’t bode well for us.
I accepted the tea in silence.
Kai sat next to me on the couch, his brows furrowed.
“How are you doing?” he asked.
An embarrassing wave of emotion crested at the sound of his voice. He’d been gone for less than a week, but it felt like a lifetime.
“I’m okay.” I let out a weak laugh. “I became famous while you were gone. Celebrity takes its toll.”
He didn’t smile at my lame attempt at a joke. “I’m dealing with Black. The Star will retract its stories.”
My forced humor slipped. “But not the one about my family,” I said quietly. “That one’s true.”
A muscle flexed in his jaw. “No. Not that one.” He set his drink on the coffee table and rubbed a hand over his face. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I…” I faltered. “I don’t know. I’ve kept it a secret for so long that it didn’t even cross my mind to say anything. I know it seems like a silly thing to hide, but my family is extremely private. The past week must be killing them.”
Guilt and shame bubbled in an unsettling stew in my stomach. “When I first moved to New York, I was pretty wild, and I didn’t want my actions to reflect poorly on them. If people knew who I was, I would’ve been all over the gossip sites. I also swore I wouldn’t rely on my family’s name and money to make my way, and I haven’t. Some people might think I’m stupid for not taking advantage of what I had, but I didn’t want to be one of those rich kids who lived off their parents’ wealth without doing anything.”
My mother had kept our personal lives out of the press for decades. Even Felix, my most high-profile brother, focused on his work in interviews. I wanted to explore the city and just live without worrying about sullying the family name, and I didn’t want people to treat me differently because I was an heiress.
No scrutiny, no expectations, no pressure.
It worked…until it didn’t.
“Did anyone know before the piece?” Kai asked, his face unreadable.
“Viv and Sloane.” I curled my hands around my mug and took solace in the warmth. “They found out organically when my mother dropped by for a surprise visit a few years ago. Sloane recognized her. Parker knew too since she ran my pre-employment background check, but she promised not to say anything.”
My trust fund was both a blessing and a curse. I didn’t have access to it yet; it would kick in if and when I “settled” into a career I loved, as determined by my mother and Gabriel. If I was still floating from job to job by the time I turned thirty, I forfeited the money to charity.
Theoretically, it was nice knowing I had money to fall back on. In reality, the age stipulation amplified the pressure. I tried not to think too much about it because when I did, I couldn’t breathe.
It wasn’t even about the trust fund as much as it was about the symbolism. If I lost it, it would mean I had failed, and failing when every door was open to me felt like a special kind of hell.
“I spoke to your brother when I was in California.”
Kai’s admission snapped me out of my spiraling self-pity.
My head jerked up. “What?”
I listened with mounting disbelief and anger as he explained what happened, from Rohan Mishra’s ultimatum to Gabriel’s appearance at the bar.
No wonder he looked so stressed. The past few days had been as shitty to him as they had been to me.
“He had no right,” I fumed. “He had absolutely no right to ambush you like that.”
“He’s your brother. He’s protective,” Kai said mildly.
Protective? Gabriel had better learn to protect himself because I was going to strangle him with one of those stupid silk ties he loved so much.
“He also mentioned someone named Easton.” Kai’s gaze remained steady while my blood solidified into ice. “Who is that?”
My heart pounded in my ears.
Forget strangulation. That was too good for my brother. I was going to make him watch while I shredded every suit in his closet with garden shears before suffocating him alive with the scraps.
A bitter taste welled in my throat. My first instinct was to lie and say I didn’t know anyone named Easton, but I was tired of living in the shadow of what happened. I’d let that asshole dictate too much of my life for too long. It was time to let go of the past, once and for all.
“Easton is my ex. The last man I was with before you and the reason I didn’t date anyone for two years.” The bitterness spilled into my chest and stomach. “I met him at a bar. I wasn’t working that night, just having fun and meeting new people. I was by myself since Sloane and Vivian were both out of town, and when he approached me, I thought he was perfect. Smart, good-looking, successful.”
Kai’s eyes darkened, but he remained silent while I talked.
“Our relationship took off quickly. Within two weeks of meeting, he was taking me on weekend getaways and buying me all these expensive gifts. I thought I loved him, and I was so blinded by my infatuation that I didn’t pick up on the red flags that are so clear in hindsight. Like the way he only took me to remote places for our dates, or how I never met his friends and co-workers because he wanted me ‘all to himself’ for a while longer.” I grimaced at my younger self’s naivety. “He spun his excuses into romantic intentions when the truth was so simple. He had a wife and two kids in Connecticut.”
A bitter sound, half laugh and half sob, scored my throat. “What a cliché, right? The proverbial married cheater with the family stashed away in the suburbs. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was when said wife walked in on us in the middle of sex.”
Kai blanched.
“Yeah, I know. She suspected he was having an affair, and she hired a private investigator to tail him. That night, she’d had a little too much to drink. Got aggressive when the P.I. sent her husband’s location to her. She showed up, screaming and crying. As you can imagine, I was horrified. I had no idea…” I forced oxygen past my tightening lungs. “Easton and his wife got into a huge argument. I tried to leave because my presence was making things worse, and that was when she…she took out a gun.”
I still remembered the cold glint of metal beneath the hotel lights. The bone-deep terror that’d robbed me of breath and the cold, pervasive silence that’d fallen over the room like a white sheet over a corpse.
“Easton and I both tried to talk her down, but she was too drunk and upset. The next thing I knew, he was trying to wrestle the gun away from her. It went off by accident, and it…” My breathing shallowed.
Screams. Cries. Blood. So much blood.
“The bullet somehow hit her. She’s alive, but she’ll never walk again.” The knowledge smashed through me like a wrecking ball, scattering jagged splinters and shattered grief through my chest. “She didn’t—I mean, she shouldn’t have taken out the gun, but she was…it wasn’t her fault. Her husband cheated on her with me, and she’s the one suffering for it.”
A sob racked my shoulders. I hadn’t talked about it in so long. Even my friends didn’t know the full truth of what happened. They just thought I’d had a bad breakup with a cheating asshole.
Talking about it with Kai broke the dam on my emotions, and everything—the guilt, the anger, the horror, the shame—rushed over me like a flood sweeping over a plain.
Kai engulfed me in his arms and held me as I cried. Easton, Valhalla, the National Star, my manuscript deadline…every fuckup and mistake I made over the past few years. They poured out of me in a river of grief until I was hollow and aching.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said quietly. “You didn’t know. You didn’t make him cheat on her, and you didn’t make her bring the gun. You’re as much a victim of the situation as anyone else.”
“I know, but it feels like my fault.” I pulled back, my voice raw from my sobs. “I was so stupid. I should’ve caught on…”
“People like that are expert cheats. You were young, and he took advantage of that. It wasn’t your fault,” Kai repeated firmly. He brushed a stray tear from my cheek. “What happened to him?”
“Last I heard, he moved to Chicago before his business went bankrupt and he’s estranged from his kids. They’re over eighteen now, and I don’t think they ever forgave him for what happened with their mother.”
I didn’t know where Easton was now. Hopefully rotting in the pits of hell.
“I see.” Kai’s expression sent a dart of trepidation down my spine.
“Don’t track him down,” I said. “I mean it. I just want to leave him in the past, and I don’t want you to get in trouble.”
A hint of amusement bloomed at the corners of his mouth. “What do you think I’m going to do to him if I do, hypothetically, track him down?”
“I don’t know.” I wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand. “Maim him?”
“That’s certainly crossed my mind,” Kai muttered. “I—”
The gentle chime of the doorbell interrupted him.
I stiffened again as Kai and I exchanged wary glances. We were lying low until the CEO vote—I snuck in through the building’s back entrance earlier—and an unexpected visit these days was more cause for alarm than celebration.
A shimmer of dread threaded through me as Kai answered the door. Had a tabloid reporter somehow gotten past security? Should I hide?
A faint murmur of voices leaked from the entryway. I couldn’t hear his exact words, but Kai’s surprised tone came through loud and clear.
He reentered the living room a minute later, his face grim.
My stomach dropped to the floor when I saw who was behind him. I suddenly wished it were a tabloid reporter; that would’ve been infinitely preferable to the newcomers.
I’d never met them in person, but I recognized their pictures from the news.
Leonora and Abigail Young.
Kai’s mother and sister.
