Chapter Two Dylan
I end the call and realize my hand is clenched so tight around the phone my knuckles burn.
“No one touches her. Not while she’s under my roof.”
The words are still hanging in the air, vibrating in my veins like an electric current. I mean them. More than I should.
Behind me, I hear a soft sniffle and the rustle of fabric. Sunny is curled into the corner of my couch, drowning in my hoodie, fingers knotted in the hem like it’s a lifeline. Her hair is a damp, tangled halo around her head. Her cheeks are blotchy from crying. She looks nothing like the composed woman I’ve seen smiling with kids in the photos Ethan shows me, the ones I always scroll past faster than I should.
She looks small. Breakable.
It makes something feral rear up in my chest.
I pocket my phone and turn back to her. “Security downstairs knows your face now,” I say. “No one gets up here without my approval. My P. I. is on your ex. If he so much as sneezes in your direction, we’ll know.”
She blinks at me, mascara smudged under her eyes. “That sounds… excessive.”
It’s not. If anything, it’s not enough. “It’s necessary.”
Her mouth tilts, a flash of stubbornness breaking through the exhaustion. I remember that—ten years old and arguing with me about whether brownies were a breakfast food. (She won. I let her think she did, anyway.)
“Dylan, I don’t want to make this a whole… operation,” she says, voice hoarse. “I just needed somewhere to land. I’m not asking you to go to war.”
Too late.
“You showed up at my door in the middle of the night with a bag and bruises,” I say, more sharply than I intend. “That’s not ‘just somewhere to land.’ That’s a problem that needs fixing.”
Her fingers tighten in the fabric of the hoodie. “I’m not a problem.”
That pricks at me. “I didn’t say you were. He is.”
Her gaze drops to the coffee table, to the ring of water from her duffel bag. “It feels kind of the same after a while.”
I exhale, slow, forcing my temper back into its cage. She’s not the enemy. I’m not in a boardroom.
“Sunny.” I cross the space between us and sit on the edge of the coffee table, close enough that I can see the faint purple shadow on the inside of her forearm when the sleeve rides up. Rage flexes under my skin. “Look at me.”
She does. Those hazel eyes are glossy but steady.
“You are not a problem,” I say, enunciating every word. “You’re a guest in my home.”
She lets out a weak laugh. “That’s… an intense way to treat a guest. Do you have any idea how insane that sounded on the phone?”
“I do, actually.” I arch a brow. “That’s why people listen when I talk.”
Her lips twitch. There. A spark of the girl I remember.
I drag a hand through my hair, shifting gears. “All right. We’re doing this my way, or not at all.”
She groans. “Oh no. Here we go.”
“House rules.” I lean my forearms on my thighs, bracing myself. “Number one: you don’t leave this apartment alone. Not until I say it’s safe.”
Her eyes go wide. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“That’s… no.” She shakes her head, wet hair brushing her cheeks. “I have a job, Dylan. I can’t just hide in your penthouse like some… like some—”
“Like some woman whose ex is currently a threat.”
“I can’t miss work.” Her voice cracks on the word. “The board already watches me like a hawk. If I don’t show up—”
“We’ll handle work tomorrow.” My tone brooks no argument, but the panic in her eyes keeps me from steamrolling her entirely. “We’ll explain you had a personal emergency. If they want more detail, they can talk to my legal team.”
Her whole body jerks at that. “No. Absolutely not. You can’t throw money at my problems.”
“I do it for everyone else,” I say flatly. “Why are you special?”
The second the words are out of my mouth, I regret them.
She flinches, like I’ve slapped her.
Nice work, Knight.
“That’s exactly the problem,” she whispers, pulling her knees up to her chest. “Trevor always thought he knew what was best for me. I don’t need another man telling me where I can and can’t go.”
A hot coil of shame unfurls in my gut. I sit back a little, giving her space. “That’s not what I’m doing.”
“It sounds like it.”
“What I’m doing,” I say carefully, choosing the words like they’re live rounds, “is not letting a guy who put his hands on you wander around the city while you pretend everything’s fine.”
Her throat bobs. She stares down at the cuff of the hoodie, rolling it between her fingers. “I’m not pretending everything’s fine.”
“You’re talking about going to work like he didn’t grab you hard enough to leave marks.”
Her shoulders hunch. A flush crawls up her neck.
I scrub a hand over my jaw, fighting the urge to pace. “Look. We’ll compromise. We assess your job situation tomorrow. Together. We’ll get you some time off, or we’ll get you transferred, or we’ll get a car and driver to take you door to door with a bodyguard in the damn classroom if that’s what it takes. But tonight?”
I gesture around us. “Tonight, you stay put. No negotiations.”
She exhales and sinks deeper into the couch, as if the cushions stole her bones. “You’re very bossy, you know that?”
“So I’ve been told.”
“By Ethan?” she asks faintly.
“By everyone who’s ever met me.”
The corner of her mouth lifts. It’s small. Tired. But it’s a smile. I’ll take it.
“Fine,” she says at last. “I’ll stay tonight. And I’ll… talk about work tomorrow. But that’s not a forever thing.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” I reply. “It just has to be a ‘you don’t die’ thing.”
“Low bar.”
“Effective bar.”
She makes a tiny, strangled sound that might be a laugh, and some of the tension in my shoulders eases.
“Rule two,” I continue. “If he contacts you, you tell me. Immediately. I don’t care if it’s a text, a call, a skywriter over Central Park. No hiding it. No pretending it doesn’t matter.”
Color drains from her cheeks. She glances away, too fast.
My eyes narrow. “Sunny.”
“I blocked him,” she says quickly. “Or I tried to. I mean, I did.” A guilty flicker crosses her face. “Mostly.”
Mostly.
I push to my feet, a throb starting behind my eye. “Give me your phone.”
She tenses like I’ve asked for a kidney. “What? No.”
“I’m not going to read your group chat about The Bachelor,” I say, exasperated. “I’m going to make sure he can’t reach you.”
“You don’t get to control my phone,” she shoots back, chin lifting. “You don’t get to control me, Dylan.”
Her defiance hits me square in the chest, half infuriating, half impressive. She looks like a drenched kitten trying to take on a Rottweiler, and somehow still, I know she’d sink her claws in if I pushed her too far.
“You asked for my help,” I remind her, temper slipping a notch. “This is what it looks like.”
“I asked for a couch, not a warden.”
The words land sharper than she probably intends, but they trigger an old, familiar switch in me. The one that flips when negotiations sour or a boardroom turns hostile. I pull the instinct up around me like armor.
“Fine,” I say, voice going cool. “Let me rephrase. You will either give me your phone, or I will call Ethan right now and tell him every detail you just told me—and then some. He can fly back from L.A. and handle it himself.”
“That’s not fair,” she breathes. Her eyes shine, betrayal and panic warring in them. “You wouldn’t.”
“You know I would.” I take my own phone out of my pocket, thumb hovering over Ethan’s name. “He’s my business partner and my best friend. He trusted me with you, whether he knows it yet or not.”
There it is—the trump card I told myself I wouldn’t play.
Sunny stares at me for a long, tremulous second. Then, with a choked little sound, she digs into the pocket of my hoodie and pulls out her phone. She holds it out like it burns.
“I hate you a little bit right now,” she mutters.
“Good,” I say, taking the device from her hand. Our fingers brush—just a quick graze, skin against skin—and something stupid and sharp shoots up my arm. I ignore it. “At least that means you’re awake.”
The screen lights up at my touch. The background is a photo of her covered in finger paint, a group of preschoolers laughing around her. My throat tightens unexpectedly. I shove it down and focus on the task at hand.
Messages. Calls. Social apps. I move through them with the efficiency that built my empire.
Text thread: Trevor. Far too many messages.
Some of them are sweet, cloying. Love-bombing garbage that makes my teeth grind.
Can’t stop thinking about you, baby. You’re my whole world.
Others… aren’t.
If you walk out that door, don’t bother coming back. No one will want you but me. You’re nothing without me.
My grip tightens, a low buzz starting in my ears. I scroll faster.
The most recent ones are timestamped tonight, not long before she arrived here.
You really think he’s better than me? Answer your phone. You can’t ignore me forever. You know where this ends.
I feel my jaw lock.
From the couch, Sunny curls her arms around her knees, eyes trained on my face. “You’re reading them,” she says quietly.
“Yeah.” My voice comes out rough. “I am.”
“I didn’t want to show you those.”
“Why not?”
“Because then it’s real,” she whispers. “As long as I didn’t look too closely, I could pretend it wasn’t… as bad as it was. That I was overreacting.”
I’m used to numbers. Charts. Risk profiles. I can quantify threats on instinct. Looking at these messages, it’s like watching a stock crash in real time—only this one is her life, her sanity, her self-worth.
“You’re not overreacting,” I say. I can’t keep the growl out of my voice. “This is harassment. It’s escalation. This is how men like him warm up before they really start getting creative.”
She flinches, hugging herself tighter. “I know.”
I open the settings and scroll to block the number. It’s already there, checked. I dig deeper. There’s another contact—same number, different name.
“T,” I read aloud. “Cute.”
Her cheeks flush. “He kept making new accounts. I kept blocking them. Eventually I stopped looking before I hit block. It was easier.”
Jesus.
I cut off every avenue I can find in under a minute—block, report, restrict. Delete the thread? My thumb hovers over the button.
“No,” Sunny says suddenly, sitting up.
I glance at her. “No what?”
“Don’t delete them.” Her voice is small but firm. “If we… if I decide to file a police report, they might be important, right?”
Right. She said we. My chest does something unwelcome at that.
“Smart.” I tap out of the thread instead, backing away from the option. “We’ll back them up somewhere secure and make copies. Evidence.”
She nods, but she’s gone pale again. “I hate that word.”
“Evidence?”
“Threats. Reports. Restraining orders.” Her gaze goes unfocused. “I didn’t become a teacher to learn legal jargon.”
“You became a teacher to take care of kids,” I say. “Let me take care of this.”
She stares at me like she doesn’t know what to do with that.
“You can… just be angry on my behalf,” she says finally, a trembling smile on her lips. “You’re very good at that.”
“I excel at anger,” I agree dryly. “It’s made me a lot of money.”
She huffs a laugh that sounds more like a sob. “Figures.”
I put the phone down on the coffee table between us, screen dark now, a small black rectangle containing far too much power. For a second, the sight of it there makes my fingers itch. I want to throw it off the balcony. Or better yet, shove it down Trevor Malone’s throat.
“Rule three,” I say, because if I don’t keep moving, I’ll do something I can’t walk back. “No unblocking him. No answering unknown numbers. No DM ‘just to see what he wants.’ You want closure, talk to your therapist when you get one. Not him.”
She winces, but nods. “I wasn’t trying to—”
“I know.” I cut her off gently. “You’ve been trying to survive. You did that. You got out. That’s not nothing.”
She looks at me like she’s trying to believe it.
I stand, needing the distance, and pick up her duffel from the floor. The damn thing weighs nothing. Did she really leave her entire life behind in a bag this light?
“Come on,” I say. “Guest room.”
Her brows shoot up. “You have a guest room?”
“What, you thought I was going to make you sleep on the couch?”
She glances at the couch like it wouldn’t be the worst fate. “It’s a very nice couch.”
“Too nice for sleeping,” I shoot back. “You’ll wrinkle the leather.”
She snorts. “Oh no, the leather.”
There it is again—that spark. I file it away, irrationally pleased.
I lead her down the hallway, flicking on a lamp in the guest suite. The room is large, soft, all neutrals and expensive bedding. Floor-to-ceiling windows look out over the river, the city lights reflecting on the glass like stars.
She stops in the doorway. “You have a better view from your spare room than I do from my entire existence.”
“Perks of being the devil,” I say.
She pads past me and sits gingerly on the edge of the bed. My hoodie swallows her, bare legs peeking out from beneath the hem. It does problematic things to my brain, so I force my eyes away.
“The bathroom’s through there,” I say, nodding toward the door on the right. “Fresh towels in the cabinet. If you need anything, my room is down the hall, second on the left.”
Her gaze flicks quickly away from that information, as if the idea of my bedroom is too much for her brain tonight. Good. Same.
“Dylan?” she asks as I set the duffel on the luggage stand.
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
The words are quiet, but they land heavy. I shrug, uncomfortable. “Don’t get used to it.”
“I mean it.” She worries her bottom lip between her teeth. “You didn’t have to open the door.”
The thought of not opening the door makes my stomach turn. “Yeah,” I say roughly. “I did.”
Her lashes lower, hiding her eyes. “Good night.”
“Good night, Sunshine.”
I flip off the light, leaving her with the soft glow of the bedside lamp, and close the door behind me.
In the dim hallway, the quiet presses in. The penthouse feels different now, less like an empty fortress and more like it’s holding something fragile in its walls.
Back in the living room, I grab her phone from the coffee table, intending to plug it in so it doesn’t die overnight. The screen lights at my touch.
Another message pops up on the lock screen.
Unknown Number: You think he can keep you from me?
The air leaves my lungs in a slow, deadly exhale.
I stare at the words, my reflection faint and distorted on the glass. My pulse pounds in my ears, the edges of my vision sharpening.
This bastard isn’t done. He’s just getting started.
I tighten my grip on the phone until the plastic creaks, a dark promise taking shape in the back of my mind.
Oh, you picked the wrong girl to terrorize.
And you definitely picked the wrong man to piss off.