Chapter 2
ELLE
Turning twenty-six should feel like something. A milestone. A beginning. At the very least, a dinner that doesn't get canceled two hours before it's supposed to happen.
But not in my world. In my world, it's just another year in captivity, but with cake.
Mom's urgent "business meeting" conveniently lands right around when my birthday dinner was supposed to be. How predictable. I should've known better than to believe she'd let me eat pasta anywhere other than this penthouse.
If disappointment paid rent, I'd own Manhattan by now.
So here I am, stuck in my bedroom alone on my birthday, debating between crying into my linguine or committing light treason.
Guess which one I go with.
"Jeffrey," I call as I step into the hallway with a towel around my neck and a duffel slung over my shoulder. "I'm going for a swim!"
The pool in the building is the one place Mother lets me go without supervision. I think by now, she knows just how much I love swimming, and thank the stars, I've always gone and come when I said I would.
So in this, she trusts me.
His voice crackles through the intercom near the elevator. "Enjoy, Ellie-girl. Don't drown. I hate paperwork, and your mother will kill me."
"Noted," I mutter, rolling my eyes as I adjust the strap of my duffel.
Inside, nestled between my towel and swim goggles, is my real weapon of choice: a little black dress smuggled past Mommy Dearest in an box I told her was books.
The elevator hums as it lowers to the pool floor. Immediately, I'm hit by the smell of chlorine and the sound of silence. The pool itself glows an impossible turquoise under recessed lights, all shimmer and hush, like a mermaid could crawl out of it and tell me to run.
That's how empty this place is.
I push through the locker room doors, my pulse already drumming. Being naughty doesn't come easy for little Miss Goody-Two-Shoes me.
The moment I'm alone, I drop the towel and unzip the bag.
There it is. The dress.
Tiny. Black. Sinful.
It looks like it was stitched together by the devil himself for a girl who would love a little trouble.
I slip it on, wriggling into the satin. It clings like it's been waiting its whole life to meet my body. The neckline dips just enough to break necks, the hem teases mid-thigh. I swipe on mascara, blush, and a bold red lip because if I'm going to crash and burn, I'm doing it while I dazzle.
My heart pounds so hard I'm surprised it doesn't echo off the tiles.
"Okay, Elle," I whisper to myself. "This is either your emancipation... or your obituary."
I undo my braid, twist the loose waves into a sleek French twist, spritz on perfume, and walk toward the employee exit with my head held high and my knees wobbling on heels meant to impale.
The guard stationed by the service door never looks up from his phone—he’s feverishly swiping on a dating app. Bless his inattentive soul.
“Have a good night,” I murmur, dropping my voice an octave.
“Have a good one,” he grunts before he buzzes me on through.
That's it.
No alarms. No thunder.
Just... open air.
I guess Mother was wrong. Not everyone in the building is the watchful guard dog she thinks them to be. That poor sucker didn't even know who I was.
Either way, Mother will have his head when she learns about this.
The night hits me like a slap I've been begging for. Cold, fizzy, electric. I could cry from how good it feels to breathe unfiltered air. Thirty-five floors up to down, and suddenly I'm standing in a city that doesn't even know I've been drooling over it for years.
I flag a cab. "Take me to... uh, the hottest club you can think of!"
The driver, bald, probably mid-forties, laughs and mutters something about "tourists" before merging into traffic.
Manhattan blurs around me in a swirl of headlights and promise. The city hums with her horns, laughter, dazzling people, and distant sirens. Every block feels like a door I've never opened.
I press my forehead to the cool glass and smile. "Happy birthday to me."
Holy shit. So this is what a nightclub looks like.
It's loud enough to rattle my bones, smells like tequila and trouble, and every light in this place is pure chaos.
The bass vibrates through the floor, up my heels, straight into my bloodstream. Two minutes in and I already feel like raising hell.
Getting in was so fucking easy I still can't believe it. The line outside curved around the block, but the bouncer waved me over. Maybe it was because I was alone, or maybe something else entirely. I didn't question it as I handed over the cash for cover.
He checked my ID, stamped my wrist, and nodded toward the entrance. "Have fun, birthday girl."
Oh, I plan to.
Inside, I'm swallowed by sound and color. Bodies move like liquid and the air tastes like trouble. I weave through the crowd, clutching my tiny purse, trying to look like I didn't just jailbreak my own life.
At the bar, I shout over the music. "Tequila soda! Make it double. It's my birthday!"
The bartender smirks, pours heavily, and slides it my way. "Welcome to the other side of your twenties. It's all downhill from here."
A stab of envy darts through me. My mother stole years of this from me. Years of music and strangers and reckless, stupid fun. All to keep me locked in her tower. For a second, I want to scream.
Then again, any freedom is precious and I don't plan to waste a single second of it. I shove Mom out of my mind, cross my fingers she won't find out where I am, and raise my glass to nobody.
One night. That's all I'm asking. One night of freedom and bad decisions.
The first sip burns like honesty. The second goes down smoother, like regret's sexier cousin. Two drinks later, my nerves dissolve into rhythm.
The lights spin gold, pink, electric blue. The music thrums under my skin like a second heartbeat. And that's when I see him.
He's leaning against the far wall like he owns it and the wall knows better than to argue. Black shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, forearms ribboned with dark ink—
My heart stops.
I know those hands. Those tattoos. The ink-dark patterns I watched catch the light on a stairwell landing less than twenty-four hours ago.
It's him.
Silver hair swept back from a face that has no interest in being kind.
A close-cropped beard, dark and silver-threaded, framing a jaw that could end careers.
Forties, easy, but the kind of forties that sharpened rather than softened.
He looks like the sort of man your mother warns you about, which is ironic, since my mother never warned me about anything except leaving.
His eyes find mine across the crowd. Blue. Even in this haze, unmistakably blue — the same blue that looked straight into mine on that landing and made my lungs forget their entire job.
They pin me in place again, and this time the tug in my chest isn't strange or unfamiliar. It's recognition, sharp and electric, like being struck by the same lightning twice.
God. How do men like this exist? Was there a secret department handing out bone structure, and I missed the memo?
He looks away, then looks back. Slow. Deliberate. Like he's giving me a choice to keep staring.
I do. Obviously. And that's my first mistake.
I should walk over. Say something. Hey, remember me? The barefoot girl with the shoe? But that would mean explaining the tower, the cage, the mother who keeps me prisoner thirty-five floors up. Tonight I'm not that girl. Tonight I'm no one's daughter and no one's captive.
I turn back to the dance floor and let the music claim me.
My hips find the beat easily; I've practiced alone for years, perfecting moves I never thought I'd get to use outside my mirror.
Lights flicker. Laughter spills. A group of girls cheer near the DJ booth.
For once, I'm not Elle the locked-away daughter. I'm just a body in motion.
Men notice. They always do when you stop trying to hide. One slides in behind me, tentative hand at my hip. Another grins as we spin. It's chaos, but for the first time in my life, chaos feels like oxygen.
But even as I move, a small voice inside me whispers that this isn't me. I was raised to be composed, proper, polished. My mother trained me to be seen only through tinted glass, not under the harsh fluorescence of a nightclub.
Yet here I am. Sweating, laughing, and moving like I was born for this.
It's terrifying how easy it is to lose the version of yourself you've been told to be. How quickly she burns away when the bass hits just right.
I close my eyes and let the music drown out the guilt, the fear, the endless what would Mother say. Because tonight isn't about her. It's not about duty or image or the cage I've spent twenty-six years in. Tonight is about me.
Just me.
I open my eyes, and an instinct I can't name tugs me to look for him again. The man against the wall.
He's still right there. Watching me. Not smiling. Not judging. Just... watching. Every nerve in my body stands at attention. The air feels heavier, thicker, and my skin prickles. I look away, and when I look back, he's still there.
My pulse becomes its own percussion track.
Someone brushes my shoulder. A guy in a too-tight shirt leans in. "You alone, sweetheart?"
He looks too drunk, and a little like a creep.
"Meeting a friend," I say, laughing. The drink helps with the confidence. The buzz of being seen helps most of all.
"What friend?" he leers, inching closer.
"An old friend," I frown.
But he doesn't stop, grabbing my wrist, trying to get me to dance. I pull away, but he just circles like a shark.
I'm uncomfortable as hell, and suddenly I wonder if this is what Mother meant when she said the world was dangerous.
But just then, I see him walking right toward us. The man from the stairs.
He puts himself between me and the drunk without a word. Doesn't shove, doesn't shout. Just stands there, and the creep takes one look at his face and vanishes into the crowd like he was never there at all.
I exhale with relief and look up into eyes that are somehow worse up close. That blue. Not warm, not kind. Just steady. The kind of eyes that look at you like they've already decided something about you and haven't bothered to share what.
Then his scent wraps around me. The same scent that clung to the stairwell air long after he'd vanished down those steps. Up close it's devastating — it cuts through the noise and lands somewhere private, somewhere that makes my pulse do things my brain hasn't approved.
“Are you following me? Did she already hire you?”
His lips quirk. “I was here before you.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I saw you come in.”
I accept that… I think. It doesn’t matter. He’s here. I’m here. And I’m desperate for attention.
"You've been watching me watch you." His voice is low, smooth, laced with something that makes my skin tighten. And there it is again. That pull. Stronger now than it was on that landing. Like a thread that's been taut since last night and just got yanked.
My heart slams. "Maybe I'm just observant."
He steps closer. The world narrows to the heat between us. His hand slides around my waist, slow, sure, possessive in a way that should terrify me. I catch the ink across his knuckles and something sparks in the back of my mind. A flicker. Gone before I can name it.
Instead, it short-circuits my brain.
"I don't think you came here to watch." His breath hits my ear, and I swear I forget English for a second.
I smirk, because fake it till you make it, right? "You always this forward with strange women?"
"Only the ones who look like they're about to start a revolution."
Well. Shit. My knees might actually give out.
The music shifts. Deeper bass, slower beat, sultry rhythm. He pulls me closer, and my body follows like it never learned the word no. Our hips move in sync. His hand tightens at my waist, fingertips grazing the edge of my thigh.
Every nerve is on fire.
Every rule I've ever been forced to follow burns away in the heat between us.
"Name?" he murmurs.
"Elle."
He smiles in that lazy, devastating way of his. "Pretty name."
"Yours?" I ask, breath hitching.
"Nik."
Just Nik. Short. Sharp. Like a knife. Figures.
His gaze drags over my face, down my throat, like he's memorizing me. “Who hurt you?”
Does he know? Is this a test?
“Does it matter?” I counter.
He considers it. “No. I suppose it doesn’t.”
I’m not sure how to feel about that. Did I want him to offer to kick someone’s ass? Play my white knight? My prince?
No. I don’t want a prince or a white knight. I want this man that I instinctively know lives in the darkness. I don’t want safe. I’ve been safe my entire life. I’m hungry for danger.
I press closer, because I've decided that tonight, rebellion looks good on me.
We dance like that, close and dangerous, for what feels like hours or seconds.
I can't tell. The world blurs, the song fades, the lights dim to a softer pulse.
With Nik, time doesn't matter. It folds in on itself, leaving just the press of his body, the rough heat of his hand at my waist, and the scent of him.
Cedar and smoke. Like a warning that learned how to whisper.
When he leans in, his lips just graze my ear. "Come with me."
It's not a question. It's gravity. I've never done this before. Not the dancing, not the drinking, and definitely not this: being this close to a man and feeling wanted instead of watched.
Every rational thought I've ever been trained to obey starts lining up to lecture me. You don't know him. You shouldn't trust him. You don't even belong here.
But none of them are loud enough to drown out the simple, aching truth pulsing beneath my skin: I want to know what it feels like to live before I go back to being locked away.
"Where?" I whisper.
He smiles, small and knowing. "Somewhere quieter."
My heart does this stupid leap. "You always kidnap girls on their birthdays?"
"Only the ones who run toward danger instead of away."
I laugh, shaking my head. "Guess that makes me your kind of idiot."
He takes my hand. His fingers are warm, rough, certain. The ink on his knuckles presses against my skin and my body hums with something that feels less like a first touch and more like a return.
"Come on, Elle."
The music swells as he leads me off the floor, through a corridor of flashing lights and perfume. My pulse is ridiculous, my brain is screaming turn back, but my heart is whispering something louder.
Finally.