Chapter 1 – ANNA
1
ANNA
T he driver, a tall, imposing man with an earpiece and sunglasses, waited to collect me when I stepped off the bus in town.
Anna Vaughn, his sign said. A name I hadn’t gone by in over six years.
It wasn’t too late. I could just turn around, get back on the bus. Keep traveling up the coast.
“Miss Vaughn,” the driver said, catching sight of me amid the other travelers. He must have been briefed well on my appearance to recognize me. I looked nothing like the Anna who left home. Full of life and spite. Lacquered and plucked and outfitted in Chanel.
I was a hollowed-out shell of that girl now. In worn Converse sneakers and a Lana Del Rey t-shirt. Sporting bruises like a necklace around my throat and cheetah spots down my arms.
I nodded once and the driver tucked his sign under his arm and indicated the exit, where I could see a sleek silver sedan parked outside, idling in the street to keep the interior temperature just right in the hot Cali sun.
“Do you require medical assistance?” the driver asked as he opened the door for me.
“No, thank you.”
He frowned at the single rolling duffle bag I dragged along with me.
“It’s all I have,” I answered his unasked question. Escaping in the middle of the night as I did hadn’t exactly left me time to pack up all my belongings. In truth, I didn’t have all that much to begin with and most of it was thrifted or bought at dollar stores.
He took the duffel, placing it into the trunk as I breathed in the smell of the ocean.
Carter. The beach. The heavy moon over the water.
It all came back like a sucker punch to the gut, and my nose wrinkled as I got into the sedan and slammed the door behind me, eager to get the briny scent out of my nose.
It wasn’t long before the familiar facade of the house came into view through the wrought iron bars as we made our way up the winding drive. Home sweet home. The driver tapped a key card against the intercom panel and the gate slid open. My stomach dropped.
Fuck.
I clasped my hands in my lap, hesitating when the sedan stopped outside the grandiose entrance, bracketed by tall white pillars and gilt-edged doors.
You have no place left to go, I reminded myself.
Josh took almost everything from me. Including most of my money to gamble away or spend on booze. It was a small miracle I was able to squirrel away the few hundred dollars I did to be able to leave him when it got really bad.
At least the others didn’t take money from me. I met all my exes serving drinks at the Butterfly Room, a high-end members-only bar, patronized by some of the richest people in St. Louis.
So, all my exes were wealthy in business, music, and other industries with the occasional trust fund brat. It was no surprise they were pushy and controlling with me. It didn’t help that I had a taste for a certain type . The brooding ones. The ones who liked it a little rough. The dark spirits who fucked like there were t-minus ten minutes to the apocalypse.
With a weakness for walking red-flags, it was no surprise that I was a magnet for troubled men. More accurately: for assholes . Had been since I was sixteen and met my first one on the beach.
That was why Josh, sweet, blue-eyed Josh who had a normal job and drove an older model car felt so safe. I couldn’t have been more wrong about him.
“Miss Vaughn, good afternoon,” a man with a headset on said, sweeping the tall front doors open before I could even knock.
I nodded, giving him a strained smile. It was a mask I’d have to get used to wearing if I expected to stay here.
Rosie, our housekeeper, was the only person I’d called to give a heads-up I was coming. Hers was the only private number I still knew by heart. Aside from Rosie, staff turnover tended to be high at the Vaughn Estate. I didn’t want to be at the gate, trying to convince the security staff that I was Anna Vaughn.
The one who was supposed to be away on a charity mission in Malawi building sustainable housing for the less fortunate. That Anna Vaughn. It was my dad’s cover story for my disappearance and it was a good one. I wished I had spent the last six years making a difference in people’s lives rather than wearing low-cut tops for tips.
“Thank you, David,” the man at the door said, taking my duffel from the driver with a raised brow.
I felt fairly safe in assuming my father wouldn’t be home this early on a Wednesday, but as the man shut the door behind me, I heard the unmistakable sound of Testoni shoes on parquet flooring approaching from the east hall.
Hudson Vaughn appeared in the entryway. He looked the same as I remembered, with just a bit more silver in his mahogany hair. Tall and regal, with a cut marble face and ice in his blue eyes.
The look he gave me would’ve been enough to paralyze me once upon a time, and that same sinking feeling tried to open a hollow pit in the bottom of my stomach. I lifted my chin.
“Can I come in?” I asked after an uncomfortable silence.
“Why did I have to hear from my security that you were coming home?” he asked, scanning me head to toe and seeming displeased with what he saw. “What happened to your neck?”
“ Dad ,” I managed to force out the word. “I’ve been traveling since last night. I’m exhausted and I need a shower. Can we do this later?”
His chest rose and fell with a short, harsh breath. He was angrier than he was letting on.
“You’re lucky you’re my daughter,” he said, giving a wave of his hand to tell me I could go. I picked my duffel up but he took one look at it and sneered. “Fredrick, dispose of that.”
The man from the door collected it from me. I held onto the handle a second longer, but let it go, knowing it wasn’t worth the fight.
“That’s all I have,” I tried. A weak attempt at an argument.
My father looked down his nose at me. “It most definitely is not. I’ve had your closet restocked with an updated wardrobe, and you’ll find everything a lady might need in your bathroom.”
…updated wardrobe?
So, this was it. I was to be his doll. To smile when looked upon. To speak when spoken to. To look the part of the governor’s daughter and act accordingly.
I knew what I was agreeing to when I decided to come home, but it still made my skin itch to be proved correct.
“You look terrible, go get cleaned up,” he said, dismissing me as if it’d been days instead of years since he’d last laid eyes on me.
Burying the jab of pain down deep where I didn’t have to feel it, I moved across the entryway. He didn’t have to tell me twice.
I went straight to my room, hoping to see Rosie along the way, but she didn’t show herself.
Inside, everything was exactly the same. The blue, white, and yellow furnishings that were my mother’s idea. The queen bed with the gold-brown teddy bear leaned against the throw pillows. In the bathroom, a bottle of what used to be my favorite Dior body wash when I was a teenager rested at the edge of the soaker tub. Rosie did this. My father wouldn’t know that I used to like to smell like ylang-ylang and vanilla. I plugged my phone in to charge and went straight to the bathroom to shower.
I scrubbed the long bus ride away, trying and failing to get the previous night out of my head.
Just like I thought he would, Josh got home in the morning after storming off last night. I knew because he called me nonstop. I blocked his number before he drained my battery.
Still not feeling quite clean enough but too tired to care, I crawled into bed, still coherent enough to hate how it felt safe.
It was a cage, but it was also home. Complete with a full security detail and cameras covering most of the property. Josh couldn’t find me here. He wouldn’t.
He was dating Annie Taylor. Not Anna Vaughn.
I reached over the nightstand for my phone. Laying my head back on the pillow, I typed another name into the search bar. Every single one of the results on the first page was highlighted purple. I had clicked them all a lot more times than I wanted to admit.
Carter Cole . I couldn’t think of home without thinking of him.
He wasn’t active on social media, unfortunately for me, but then neither was I. In fact, you couldn’t find so much as a recent photograph of me anywhere on the internet from the last six years. I made sure of it.
I opened the first link, his company’s website. He was a CEO of some big ass company now. Not bad for a guy who used to work two jobs when we were in high school. I sounded spiteful, and I was, but I was happy for him too. As happy as I could be for the boy who started my epic run of terrible luck with men.
The others I could forget. Their faces all faded with time and distance. But not his.
He was the one I could never forget. No matter how far I ran. No matter who shared my bed. When I shut my eyes at night, his was the face that infected my dreams.
Carter never struck me, never made me feel unsafe, never accused me of infidelity, and never ever threatened me. Josh had done all of those things within a month of being together. But none of the assholes in St. Louis could break the heart that Carter had already shattered.
The boy on the beach figured out how to get into investing, working his way from a startup he sold for an obscene amount of money. He stayed on as the company’s CEO and had done well for himself ever since. The only picture of him on the site was one with the company’s shareholders. There he was, second from the left, arms behind his back, with a slight smile pulling the corners of his mouth. His dark brown hair, shorter than it used to be, was slicked back, his face clean-shaven, looking every bit the young professional.
It was infuriating how good he looked in a suit. A guy shouldn’t be able to look equally sexy in a tie and black slacks as he did in torn jeans and weathered band tees.
The pose, hands behind his back, I guessed was intentional, since in any press photos I happened across online showed tattooed hands and arms with even more ink peeking out from the low hung collars of the muscle-tees he seemed to like to wear while out running.
He looked like a devil in saint’s clothing, and not for the first time I wondered how exactly he managed to climb so high. I knew the rumors courtesy of Tumblr, Reddit, and about a dozen other sites I encountered in my semi-regular online stalking. Supposedly Carter did some very shady shit to clamor out of the muck and into the gleaming spires of his company building.
Some anonymous accounts alluded to things like blackmail and mafia-connections, while others accused him of far worse. But if the coroner said it was an accident or natural causes, then it was an accident or natural causes, right? People could be so dramatic.
I closed the company page and opened the third link, a feature with a business magazine about his meteoric rise to success. These pictures were better. Besides a couple of pictures of him at his office, there were some more candid-style photos at his home. Photographers used stunt homes for these kinds of things all the time, but if it really was his house, we lived in the same neighborhood now.
Would I run into him? Did I want to?
I tossed my phone away, unable to look at his face anymore, feeling the lure of the beach that I could see outside the doors to the veranda off my room. How many nights had I climbed down the lattice to the patio stones below and run off down the hedge path and out to the sandy shore?
Too many.
If I were careful, I wouldn’t have to see his face again. I’d stay long enough to secure my safety and figure out where to go next.
Carter wouldn’t ever know I was here.