Chapter 2
* * *
Draven woke to cold sheets and the absence of a weight that had been pressed against his side for most of the night.
He kept his eyes closed a moment, certain she’d shifted somewhere nearby, the bathroom maybe, or the small balcony off the room.
He reached anyway, palm sliding across the mattress where she should have been, finding nothing but the cooling indent her body had left behind.
He sat up fast, scanning the room in the gray light before dawn.
Her dress was gone from the floor where it had landed the night before.
Her shoes, her clutch, the small gold earrings she’d set on the nightstand at some point, all of it gone.
The bathroom door stood open, the light off, no sound of water, no shape moving behind the frosted glass.
He stayed there a moment longer, jaw tight, waiting for some part of the room to contradict what was already obvious.
She’d left.
He got up and pulled his pants on, moving through the room with the methodical calm he used on everything that mattered.
Under the bed. The desk by the window. The drawer of the nightstand, in case she’d tucked a note somewhere out of old habit, even with the rule they’d set.
Nothing. No name scrawled on hotel stationery, no number on a napkin, not even a lipstick mark on a glass to prove the night had been real and not something he’d built out of exhaustion and three glasses of scotch.
He picked up the pillow on her side and pressed it once to his palm, and there she was anyway, the warmth long gone but the shape of her still in everything, the way she’d arched under him, the small wrecked sound she’d made against his shoulder, the certainty in her eyes when she’d fisted his shirt in the doorway and dared him to back out.
He set the pillow down and made himself stop.
He stood at the window with his hands braced on the sill, looking down at the street where they’d stopped under the lights two blocks from here, where he’d kissed her like the rest of the city had been switched off for the occasion.
The sun barely touched the horizon over the water.
He’d known, walking her up here, that this would end with her name in his hands by morning.
He’d been certain of it the way he was rarely certain of anything that didn’t come with a contract attached.
He pulled out his phone and called Castillo before he let himself think too hard about why.
“It’s early,” Castillo said, voice thick with sleep.
“I need a guest registry pulled. This hotel, room three-fourteen, checked in within the last week.” Draven kept his voice flat, the way he gave every other order. “Single female occupant. I want a name.”
A pause, then the sound of Castillo sitting up, suddenly awake. “You want me to pull a guest registry. From a hotel we don’t own.”
“I want you to find out who was staying in this room.” His hand tightened on the phone. “I’ll send the address.”
“Draven.” Castillo rarely used his first name, which meant he was choosing his words. “Is everything alright?”
“Everything’s fine.” Too fast, too clipped, and he knew Castillo heard the lie sitting right underneath it. “Just get me the name.”
He hung up before Castillo could ask anything else and stood with the phone still in his hand, replaying the last clear image he had of her, her hand fisted in his shirt, her eyes dark and certain, nothing nervous left in her at all.
He hadn’t imagined that. Whatever rule they’d invented on a rooftop, that look had not been part of the game.
He’d built an empire out of patience, out of knowing exactly when to wait and exactly when to move, and right now every instinct he owned was screaming at him to move.
A data analyst, two months into a new city, working for a company that bore his own name without her having the faintest idea what that meant.
It would not take much. A guest list. A staff directory.
A description, if it came to that, though he wouldn’t need one.
He could draw her from memory, every line of her, if someone forced him to.
He pulled his shirt off the floor and shrugged it on, buttoning it with hands that weren’t quite steady, and looked out at the city one last time before he left the room. She thought this ended with a quiet hallway and a door clicked softly shut.
She had no idea she’d just handed him a reason.
* * *
Several weeks later…
Sloane stood in her kitchen with her phone propped against the coffee maker, rereading the email for the fourth time since it had landed the night before.
Mercer Enterprises, Senior Data Strategy Analyst, one-year contract, relocation assistance already used, signing bonus wired upon execution.
She’d read corporate offer letters before, dozens of them, but never one with a number attached that made her sit down on her own kitchen floor and laugh out loud, alone, at eleven at night.
She’d called her mother the second she signed, before the ink had finished settling.
Diane had gone quiet on the other end for a long moment, the kind of quiet that meant she was doing math in her head, the same math she’d been doing for two years since the medical bills started stacking up after Sloane’s father passed.
“Mom, it’s enough to clear all of it. The hospital, the card, all of it.
” She’d heard her mother’s breath catch, heard her sit down hard on a chair somewhere back in Macon, and for a second neither of them had said anything else, because there wasn’t anything that needed saying.
Now, three weeks later, she stood in front of her closet deciding between two blazers, both new, both bought with money she still hadn’t fully processed having.
She chose the navy, the one that made her look like she belonged in a building with that much glass and steel, and pulled it on over a cream blouse she’d ironed twice just to be sure.
Her long braids fell neat down her back, the new style still a little unfamiliar against her shoulders, a clean break from the curls she’d worn pinned up on the worst day of her old life.
Her hands weren’t quite steady this morning, though she told herself that was nerves and nothing more, the ordinary kind that came with a first day anywhere.
She caught her reflection in the mirror and paused, studying the faint hollow under her eyes that concealer hadn’t fully managed to hide against her warm brown skin.
She’d been tired in a way that didn’t make sense for someone who slept eight hours a night, a deep, bone-level exhaustion that hit hardest in the early afternoon.
Her stomach had turned twice this week at smells that had never bothered her before, coffee one morning, the lavender candle in her own bathroom the next.
She’d chalked it up to stress, to the move, to a few drinks too many at a rooftop bar two months ago that she still hadn’t quite managed to set down.
She thought about him more than she wanted to admit, more than felt reasonable for a man whose name she’d never even gotten.
She remembered the exact shade of his eyes under the string lights, the rough drag of his voice against her ear, the way he’d looked sprawled across the bed at four in the morning with every wall stripped away.
She’d told herself it was a closed door, a single night meant to stay exactly where she’d left it, and most days she almost believed it.
This morning, smoothing the front of her blazer, she let herself wonder for just a moment what he was doing right now, whether he ever thought about the woman who’d slipped out of his bed before sunrise without a word.
She shook the thought loose, grabbed her bag, and checked her reflection one final time before heading for the door, tucking a loose braid back over her shoulder.
The bonus had cleared, her mother’s debt was gone, and she had a year-long contract at one of the most prominent companies on the East Coast waiting for her at the end of a twenty-minute drive.
Whatever had happened on that rooftop belonged to a different version of her life, a chapter she had no intention of reopening just because her body kept insisting on reminding her of it at inconvenient moments.
The drive into downtown Miami took her past the same string of palms she’d walked under two months before, and she made herself look straight ahead at the road instead of toward the hotel two blocks from where she’d once stood under those lights.
The Mercer Enterprises tower rose ahead of her, all dark glass and clean lines, more imposing in daylight than it had seemed from a distance the few times she’d glimpsed it from across the city.
She parked in the garage reserved for new staff, smoothed her blazer one last time in the rearview mirror, braids catching the morning light, and told herself this was exactly the fresh start she’d promised herself two months ago on a bathroom floor in a wedding dress.
She crossed the lobby with her badge clipped neat to her blazer, heels clicking steady against the marble, her chin level the same way it had been the day she walked out of that freezer and never looked back.
The receptionist smiled and directed her toward the elevator banks, told her someone from HR would meet her on the fourteenth floor to finish onboarding.
Sloane thanked her and stepped into the elevator alone, watching the numbers climb, unaware of the man two floors above her own, sitting behind a closed office door with her signed contract already filed under his direct authorization, who had known her exact start time for three weeks and had been waiting for this particular elevator to reach this particular floor far longer than she could have imagined.
* * *