Chapter 2 #2
I remembered his hand on mine. The impossible heat of his skin. The way he’d looked at me like I was something to be consumed.
My pulse quickened. I pretended it was fear.
Just fear. Nothing else.
“There you are.”
I startled so hard I nearly knocked over my drink. Joe slid onto the stool beside me, already checking his phone before he even looked at me.
“Sorry I’m late. Had a meeting that ran over.”
“On a weeknight?”
“Client dinner.” He flagged down the bartender without looking at me. “Scotch, neat.”
No real apology. No asking how my day was. Just sliding into the seat beside me like I hadn’t been waiting alone for the past hour.
Something cold settled in my stomach.
Dinner was painful. Joe talked about his father’s investment firm, about the deals he was learning to close, about his future. He talked about himself. About his ambitions. About the vacation house his parents were buying in Aspen.
Our food arrived. We ate. He checked his phone eleven times. I counted.
I wondered if I’d always been this invisible to him, or if this was new.
“So.” He set down his fork and looked at me. Really looked, for the first time all evening. “I’ve been thinking.”
“About what?”
“Us. The future.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small velvet box.
My heart stopped.
“We should just do it,” he said. “Get married before you leave for school. Makes sense, right? Lock things down.”
He opened the box. A diamond ring glittered inside, cold and perfect. Expensive. Practical.
“Joe…”
“It’s practical.” He was already nodding, like I’d agreed. Like my answer was a formality. “Long distance is hard. This way we’re committed. Official. Your dad would probably be relieved.”
I stared at the ring. At him. At the man I’d been dating for two years, who was proposing to me in a hotel restaurant after ignoring me all through dinner. Who’d mentioned my father’s relief before my happiness.
“That’s not a proposal.” My voice came out steadier than I felt. “That’s a business merger.”
His face went hard. “What?”
“Where’s the romance, Joe? The declaration of love? The ‘I can’t imagine my life without you’?” I pushed back from the table. “You didn’t even get down on one knee.”
“I didn’t think you were the type for all that.”
“Every girl is the type for all that.” I stood up. “The answer is no.”
His jaw clenched. That entitled anger I’d been seeing more and more lately. The one that made me feel small when I disagreed with him. “You’re making a mistake, Lena. You think you can do better than me?”
“I think I deserve someone who actually wants me. Not just someone who wants to lock things down.”
I walked away before he could respond. My hands were shaking. My eyes burned.
But underneath the hurt, underneath the humiliation, I felt something else.
Relief.
I didn’t want to go back to my room. Didn’t want to sit alone with the echo of Joe’s voice in my head. So I walked. Through the lobby, past the elevators, up the grand staircase with its worn red carpet.
I took the stairs to my father’s floor, needing the time to compose myself. The hallway was dark, his office door slightly ajar.
Strange. Papa never left his office unlocked.
I pushed the door open. “Papa?”
Empty. The desk lamp cast a pool of yellow light across stacks of paperwork. Nothing unusual, except…
A folder sat open on his desk. Not tucked away in a drawer like everything else. Just sitting there, like he’d been interrupted mid-review.
I knew I shouldn’t look.
I looked anyway.
APEX LENDING was printed across the top of the first page. Debt Collection Notice.
My blood went cold.
I flipped through the pages with trembling fingers. Loan agreement. Interest calculations. Collateral assessment.
The hotel. Our hotel. Listed as collateral against a twenty-million-dollar loan.
Twenty million dollars.
I sank into my father’s chair, the pages blurring before my eyes. This couldn’t be real. We were fine. We’d always been fine. The hotel was profitable, the guests kept coming, we had staff and traditions and a century of history.
But the numbers didn’t lie. The loan had been taken out three years ago. The interest had been compounding. And now, according to this notice, a payment had been missed.
The entire balance was due immediately.
Twenty million dollars we didn’t have.
And at the bottom of every page, a signature I didn’t recognize. Some corporate officer from a company I’d never heard of.
Apex Lending. The name meant nothing to me. Just another faceless financial institution, another predator circling a wounded animal.
They owned our debt.
They owned us.
Shoving the papers back into the folder, I headed for the elevator. Dad and I needed to talk.
The penthouse was quiet when I stepped inside. Too quiet.
“Papa?”
He was on the floor just inside the hallway. One hand clutched his chest. The other reached toward me, trembling.
“Lena…”
“Papa!” I dropped to my knees beside him. His face was gray, his lips tinged blue. “Someone help! I need help!”
Marjorie came running from the kitchen. Her scream echoed off the marble floors as she saw him crumpled there.
“Call an ambulance!” I grabbed my father’s hand. It was cold. So cold, when he’d always been so warm. “Stay with me, Papa. Please, please stay with me.”
His eyes found mine. For one moment, I saw something there I’d never seen before.
Regret.
Then his eyes rolled back and his hand went limp in mine.
The next hours came in fragments. Paramedics pushing through the door.
Marjorie sobbing somewhere behind me. The ambulance ride where I held Papa’s cold hand and watched the machines beep and tried not to scream.
The fluorescent glare of the emergency room.
Forms to sign. Questions I couldn’t answer. And then waiting. Endless waiting.
The hospital waiting room was beige. Beige walls. Beige chairs. Beige linoleum that squeaked under rubber soles. I’d been staring at it for hours, memorizing every crack in the paint, every scuff on the floor.
Somewhere in this building, my father was fighting for his life. Somewhere behind those swinging doors, doctors were doing things I couldn’t imagine, trying to undo whatever had broken inside him.
And I was sitting here. Useless. Like I always was.
“Ms. Hughes?”
I looked up. A doctor in blue scrubs stood before me, his face carefully neutral. The kind of face they must teach in medical school. The one that doesn’t give anything away.
“Your father suffered a massive stroke. We’ve stabilized him, but…” He paused. That pause was falling. “He’s in a coma. We don’t know when, or if, he’ll wake up.”
The words hit me like physical blows. Coma. Don’t know. If.
“Can I see him?”
He nodded and led me down a hallway that smelled like antiseptic and sorrow. My father lay in a narrow bed, tubes snaking from his arms, machines beeping steadily in the silence.
He looked small. Fragile. Nothing like the man who’d run the hotel with an iron fist, who’d kept me at arm’s length my whole life, who’d never trusted me with anything that mattered.
I took his hand. Still cold.
“I found the papers, Papa.” My voice cracked. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you let me help?”
No answer. Just the steady beep of machines. The hiss of the ventilator. The silence where his voice should have been.
I stayed until the nurses made me leave. Until the sun came up. Until I had no choice but to return to the hotel and face whatever came next.
Twenty years old. No business training. No idea what I was doing. A twenty-million-dollar debt hanging over our heads like an axe.
And somewhere out there, the people behind Apex Lending were waiting.
The predators had all the time in the world.