Chapter Forty-five
Inna Grace
Florida felt like home when we landed. I didn’t have many good memories tied specifically to Miami, but Florida had become familiar over time.
The mansion, the beach outside, the constant movement of workers through the hallways, all of it sat close to comfort, which was dangerous, and I needed to examine.
I freshened up quickly after we arrived and went straight to Caitlin’s room.
After knocking once, I pushed the door open.
The room was empty, but the balcony door was open, the curtains shifting softly in the wind.
I walked farther in and stepped onto the balcony where Caitlin stood at the railing with earphones in.
She was staring down at the swimming pool area where Cole was riding a bike.
I tapped her shoulder. She turned fast, startled at first, then her face brightened when she saw me. “I thought you’d want to rest first,” she said.
“Just needed to freshen up.” I sat down in a nearby chair.
“How was the trip? Did you tour around New York?”
The question made my chest tighten. It dragged memories about what happened back there.
Memories I didn’t want. The way my mother looked at me across the table, like I was an interruption to her schedule.
The realization that the man I spent months hating, the man who took my father and wanted Cole, was my grandfather.
I cut the thoughts off before they could settle. There was no point dwelling on them. I had more important things to focus on.
“Inna?” Caitlin snapped her fingers lightly in front of my face.
I blinked and looked down at my phone. “So,” I said, opening my notes app. “I’ve been doing some research. You can say no if it doesn’t feel right,” I continued, “but I think we should open an online store for your designs.”
Her eyebrows lifted, and her expression shifted immediately from curiosity to confusion. “My designs?”
“Yes. They’re good.” I scrolled through my notes. “We find a tailor, make a few pieces, photograph everything properly, then market it on social media and direct traffic to the store.”
She stayed quiet for a moment before sitting beside me. “Do you really think people would buy them?”
“I wouldn’t be suggesting it if I didn’t.
It will be your store. Your name. Your designs.
You will pay me as your employee.” I said, and a smile tugged at her lips.
“We will need startup money,” I continued.
“Not much. Just enough for fabric, tailoring, packaging, and the basics. We can figure it out.”
“I don’t know.” She looked down at her hands briefly. “I’ve never shown them to anyone except you. What if they’re not good enough? What if Dmitri doesn’t agree? It’s not like you’re—”
“I don’t care what Dmitri thinks about it.” The interruption came out sharper, and Caitlin stopped talking. I kept my eyes on the phone for a second longer before forcing my voice back down. “The question is whether you want this. Whether you want to make money doing something you actually love.”
“Of course I do,” she said. “I always wanted to. My parents never took it seriously, and then Ivan…” She hesitated. “He hated seeing me draw anything.”
“Let’s not talk about family,” I declared. “We’re grown. We don’t need their permission to build something for ourselves. All they know how to do is show up and expect gratitude for it.”
Caitlin blinked and studied me more carefully after that. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said too fast and looked back at my notes. “I think we should start with two designs. You make every creative decision. I’ll handle the marketing side.”
She nodded slowly. “I know a tailor, actually. We could talk to him.”
“Perfect.” Something restless had already started moving inside me again. Plans. Timing. Numbers. Steps. Movement felt better than stillness. “I’ll figure out the money.”
“I have savings. We could help pay for it,” she said, and I looked at her. “No one has ever really believed in my designs before,” she admitted. “I always wanted this to become something real.”
“It will.” The certainty in my voice surprised even me.
I needed it to work. Not just for Caitlin, but for me too. I stood up before the conversation could slow down again.
“I’m going to do more research tonight,” I said. “We need to understand the algorithm before we post anything.”
Caitlin laughed softly. “You’re already acting like a business manager.”
“Someone has to,” I pointed and then left the room.
We didn’t have time to waste. Now that she had agreed, the only thing left was to make it real.
If my mother could leave and build an entirely new life for herself, then I could build one too. Something that belonged to me. Something that would still exist even if everyone else left.
I opened a new note on my phone as I headed toward the swimming pool where I had seen Cole earlier. I could do some research while watching him. The next step was to understand exactly what we were walking into before we spent a single dollar.
Stepping outside, I looked up at Cole riding circles around the pool. “Be careful. Should you even be riding that close to the pool?” I called out.
“You’ve seen me ride here before,” he replied, looping past me without slowing down.
I settled onto the sunbed beside the pool and focused on my phone.
I searched for fashion designers and filtered through the accounts that actually pulled numbers.
The first posted daily content in the same format every time: an outfit reveal paired with a trending sound.
The second account was smaller, but every video was filled with comments asking where people could buy the clothes.
That meant demand already existed. The third designer did something different.
She filmed the entire process from sketching to the finished product.
People watched, not because the clothes themselves were extraordinary, but because the story behind them kept people invested.
That was a good angle. We could show the process and add some details. I wrote the idea down. We were also going to price everything accordingly. We would price confidently, not cheaply. Cheap attracted people who didn’t value the work.
I was still typing when Cole dropped beside me and leaned over to look at my screen. I locked the phone immediately.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
I placed the phone down and looked at him instead, reaching over to push the hair away from his face. Iker wanted him. That man, our grandfather, the man who destroyed our family, decided Cole belonged in whatever came next.
He would have to go through me first. I didn’t spend nine years keeping Cole fed, getting him through school, and raising him just for some man tied to us by blood to appear and decide Cole’s future belonged to a family business.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Cole leaned away from my hand.
I realized I had been cupping his face without noticing, holding him the way people hold things they’re terrified of losing.
“Like what? You’re my brother. I can look at you however I want.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He stood, already done with the conversation, and climbed back onto the bike. “I know.”
I watched him ride off and finally let out a slow breath.
Cole would grow up doing exactly what he wanted. That wasn’t hope anymore. It was a decision I was making while sitting on a sunbed in a mansion I didn’t own, wearing a ring I hadn’t earned, completely dependent on a man whose world turned out to be exactly what I’d suspected.
My eyes moved across the compound, taking in the surroundings properly this time.
A guard stood near the east wall while several others remained positioned by the gate.
More moved quietly through the property, monitoring everything.
Before New York, I never paid attention to any of them.
Now I understood exactly what all of this meant.
My mother ran the same kind of operation.
She was born into it and shaped by it. But at least now I knew she was alive.
She wasn’t lying dead in a ditch somewhere.
She looked as if she had never once lost a night of sleep or a meal.
All those years, I built a version of her suffering the way we suffered, missing us the way I missed her. It turned out she was fine.
Caitlin was already on her laptop when I walked in. She has been excited about the business since we started. She made the whole thing feel real instead of theoretical.
“I was just about to call you.” She turned the screen toward me with a smile. “The website is ready. Look.”
I moved closer and looked over the laptop screen. She had done a good job. The layout looked clean, with clear sections and enough warmth to make it feel professional.
Good.
“Did the tailor send the video?” I asked.
The brightness on her face shifted slightly. “Not yet. He said he needed one more hour so he could—”
“It’s been four days, Caitlin.”
She straightened in her chair. “It’s just a delay. These things happen.”
“They shouldn’t.” I pointed at my phone. “Four days for one dress. We should be posting previews by now. That’s how you build anticipation before launch.”
“Inna, it’s not that serious. We’ll have the video in an hour.” She waved toward the laptop. “We’ll post today. It’s fine.”
Not that serious. Everything felt serious to me. Money felt serious. Timing felt serious. The distance between where we were and where we needed to be felt serious.
I knew what happened when people moved too slowly. Life swallowed them whole while they were still convincing themselves they had time. You woke up one day, back at the beginning, sitting in a tiny apartment, trying to explain to a nine-year-old why dinner looked smaller than yesterday.
I looked away before any of that reached my face.
“People fail because they move slowly,” I said. “If we want this to work, we can’t keep waiting for people to deliver things whenever they feel like it. If we set timelines, we hold them.”