Chapter 18
Sebastian
This was the place I escaped to after my days at the prep school my dad insisted I attend.
The kind of school where every kid had a legacy and every parent had an agenda except me. By the final bell, I’d be suffocating in pressed uniforms and expectations.
So I’d take the city bus, the one that rattled down Third Avenue and dropped me a few blocks from here. I’d walk the rest of the way, tugging at my tie, peeling off the version of myself my father tried to mold.
At Bastian’s, I could breathe. I didn’t have to pretend to want to join my father in the world of banking. Or pretend to be the man he wanted me to be.
Sometimes I helped in the kitchen, refilling waters, bussing tables, slicing bread while my grandfather told the same stories I never got tired of hearing. Other days, I’d sit in the back corner, this very table, spreading out my homework as the dinner rush moved around me.
It wasn’t high-end.
It wasn’t polished.
And that was precisely why my father hated it.
He believed we’d “bettered ourselves,” that we’d clawed our way out of the working class and never needed to look back. But my grandfather never saw it that way. To him, dignity wasn’t something you bought; it was something you lived.
And here, in this small, imperfect bistro with its warm bread and scratched wooden tables… I felt more like myself than I ever did in my father’s world.
I’d been lucky, in the end.
Lucky that I discovered early on I had a knack for computers—systems, patterns, the kind of logic that always made more sense than people. And luckier still that I crossed paths with Ethan and Victor at school. A match made in heaven, though none of us would’ve admitted it back then.
Three kids who didn’t fit the mold we were shoved into.
All of us were “new money,” which meant the old families ignored us unless they needed someone to look down on. Funny how the ones who looked down on us now want meetings.
Three minds wired for precision in a place obsessed with pedigree.
Three boys who built something in the computer lab that no one expected—and no one could control.
For the first time, I wasn’t alone.
And for the first time, my life started to feel like mine.
“This is good.” Mira tipped the glass to her lips again, and I watched her beautiful neck work as she swallowed.
I nudged the tray of meats and cheeses toward her. The last thing I needed was her drinking on an empty stomach. She’d been working nearly as long as I had, and neither of us had any sense of self-preservation left.
“So,” I said, leaning back slightly, “I have a rule about dinner.”
She pursed her lips. The memory of her on her knees—her mouth wrapped around my cock, her eyes glazed with obedience—hit me so hard I almost forgot what I was saying.
“Yes,” she asked softly.
I cleared my throat, forcing the image out of my mind. “We’ve been working long hours, so how about this once, we don’t discuss work. Nothing about the shit storm that’s coming.”
She set her glass down, fingers light on the stem. “I understand. But can I say one thing, first?”
I dipped a piece of bread into the oil. “Okay,” I said, popping it into my mouth.
Her voice softened. “You’re going to be fine. We’ll figure this out.”
The words shouldn’t have hit me the way they did.
But they did.
Hannah arrived with our plates, sliding them in front of us with practiced ease.
“Enjoy your meal,” she said before disappearing toward the kitchen.
Hannah was a sweet kid—barely nineteen—and one of my distant cousins.
My father hated that side of the family, pretended they didn’t exist.
Where he had clawed his way out of the working class and polished every trace of it off himself, my aunt had stayed. Kept the accent, kept the roots, kept the grit.
A family divided by ambition.
By pride.
By money.
I’d hated it, every polished, artificial piece of the life my father tried to script for me, and I’d been determined to carve my own path. So I had.
“How long have you been in Seattle?” I asked.
“A year,” she said. “I moved here when I got the job at Sentinel.”
I paused, fork halfway to my mouth.
A year. That was nothing in this city…A year.
She’d worked for me for a year.
Jesus.
She’d been in my building—on my payroll, in my orbit—for twelve damn months, and I hadn’t noticed her the way I should’ve. Not until she got on the wrong elevator. Not until she looked up at me with those wide, startled eyes and turned the prettiest shade of red I’d ever seen.
And now she was sitting here in my grandfather’s bistro, licking salmon off her lower lip like she wasn’t unraveling me thread by thread.
That was nothing in this city. Most people didn’t last six months. Seattle chewed through transplants the way my father had chewed through assistants—quickly and without any remorse.
But Mira… she’d shown up every day, worked hard, and kept her head down until the day she couldn’t. The day she saved my company.
“Where are you from?”
She took a bite of her salmon, and the way she closed her eyes and moaned in appreciation had me hard in an instant. I’d never met anyone who I’d had this reaction to. I wasn’t able to make sense of it.
“Idaho.”
“That’s a change.”
She nodded. “I needed something different. There wasn’t much for me there, so after a couple years of community college, I enrolled in Western Washington. Transferred in with whatever credits I salvaged.”
I lifted a brow. “Bellingham.”
“Yeah.” She smiled faintly. “My family’s simple, and I never fit so I went somewhere I wasn’t looked at like I was freak. I worked part-time, lived in a tiny apartment with two other girls, and tried not to think about how many student loans I was racking up.”
She gave a soft, self-deprecating laugh. “It took me longer than it should have to graduate because I cut back part time. Rent went up, and I just got to the point I didn’t want to borrow anymore money. I kept at it, I just didn’t want to go home, so I made it work.
She said it so casually—like she didn’t realize how fucking impressive it was to uproot her whole life, chase a city this size with no connections, and land a job at a company that chewed people up as fast as it hired them.
“You took the job,” I said, my voice quieter than I intended.
“I did.” She reached for her wine again, swirling it gently. “Packed everything I owned in my car and drove here. Didn’t know anyone. Didn’t know the city. I was terrified.” Her cheeks warmed with a shy smile. “Still kind of am, sometimes.”
Something inside me shifted. So much for me finding something to not like about her. Something to help me get her out of my system.
She’d made a life out of stepping into discomfort and holding her ground.
“You made it,” I told her.
Her eyes lifted to mine, soft, searching. “Yeah,” she said quietly. “I guess I did.”
For a moment, neither of us looked away.
Then I leaned forward, unable to help myself.
“Why analytics?” I asked.
Her lips parted, surprised. Unmasked. A look that made it far too easy to imagine her on her knees again, obeying my voice without hesitation.
And I braced myself, because I knew whatever came next would hit me harder than I was ready for.
She set her fork down, her hands knotting together in her lap.
“When I was a kid,” she said, “I realized pretty early that people didn’t make sense.” A soft laugh slipped out. “They’d say one thing and mean another. They’d change their minds. They’d get mad.” She paused, her eyes lifting to mine. “They let you down.”
I didn’t breathe, waiting for her to continue.
“So I like numbers,” she continued. “Patterns. Things I could understand. Things that stayed the same no matter how messy everything else got.” She lifted her wine but didn’t drink it. “I liked knowing that if I looked long enough, I could always find the truth.”
I sipped my wine and took her in.
“And data…” She toyed with the hem of her sleeve. “Data doesn’t judge you. It doesn’t care if you’re from a small town or if your clothes are from Goodwill. It just is. You look at it, and you see what everyone else missed.”
I gulped. She wasn’t still talking about data anymore.
She was talking about herself. About being overlooked, underestimated, unseen.
“And maybe…” Her voice dropped a fraction. “Maybe I liked feeling good at something. Especially when no one expected me to be.”
Damn her.
Damn the way she kept showing me pieces of herself I had no business wanting.
I admired her—more than I should. She never expected praise or recognition. She never expected anyone to look at her and see her. But I’d spent too many Saturday nights with her bound beneath my hands to pretend I didn’t know exactly how deeply she craved it.
“Someone should have,” I said.
Her head lifted slightly, eyes narrowing like maybe she wasn’t sure she’d heard me right.
I leaned in just a fraction. “Expected it. Expected you.”
My voice came out lower than I intended—rough, intimate, too close to the tone I used in the dark. The tone meant to disguise me. For a heartbeat, fear flashed through me that I’d slipped. That she’d recognize it.
Color warmed her cheeks, softer now—something caught between surprise and something she didn’t have a name for yet. If she recognized the tone, she didn’t let on.
“Well… no one ever did,” she whispered.
“I do,” I said—too quickly, too honestly—before my brain had a chance to stop me.
She was my employee. And I was training her in submission without her knowing who I was.
One wrong step, and this entire thing would explode in my face.
I had enough scandal waiting to swallow me whole; I didn’t need to invite more.
Her hand stilled on her napkin. The air between us tightened, a live wire stretched straight between her and me. She didn’t look away.
Neither did I.
“Mira.” Her name came out deeper, darker. “Look at me.”
She did—slowly, like she felt the shift too. God, she was born for submission and she wasn’t aware of it. It just came naturally.
“You shouldn’t have had to earn that,” I told her. “Being seen. Being believed in.” My jaw ticked, wanting to take on everyone who had ever doubted her. “People should’ve recognized exactly what you are.”
Her breath hitched. “What I am?”
“Exceptional.”
As much as the word said, it barely scratched the surface. It didn’t come close to the wildfire she lit under my skin, the obsession she stirred without even trying. If she had any idea what she did to me… she’d run. Or she’d lean closer.
Her fingers curled, knuckles whitening around the napkin. She wasn’t blushing now—she was unraveling, inch by inch. And I was the one pulling the thread.
A dangerous goddamn thing, her in public outside of the mystique of Sanctum.
I leaned closer, my voice nothing but a low current meant only for her.
“And if no one told you that before now…then they were fucking blind.”
Emotion flickered across her face—hope, disbelief, want. A lethal mix. One that hit harder than I wanted to admit.
The kitchen door swung open behind her, pans clattering, voices rising. The moment snapped us out of the moment, but didn’t vanish. It simply burrowed deeper.
I sat back enough to breathe. Barely.
“Eat,” I said softly, though the edge in my voice betrayed me.
She cocked her head, almost as if she was deciding if she’d challenge me, but she picked up her fork instead and took a bite of her food.
Tonight had been a really, really bad idea.