CHAPTER ONE
THE THING ABOUT STARTING over is that nobody tells you how boring it is.
Like, seriously.
Books and movies make it look like this big dramatic moment.
You cry in the rain, you cut your hair, you move to a new city, and then a montage plays where you’re jogging at sunrise and laughing with new friends and ordering coffee with the confidence of someone who has never been dumped by text message.
I look at the books now. They’re organized by color, which I know is objectively unhinged, but I like the way it looks.
A little rainbow of secondhand paperbacks, their spines cracked and faded, most of them romances.
Because I’m apparently the kind of person who still reads love stories even after her own turned out to be fiction.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand. A text from my mom.
Joni: Good morning sweetheart! Remember to eat breakfast! I read that skipping meals affects your brain chemistry and I don’t want your brain chemistry affected!
This is followed by three sun emojis, a flexing arm, and what I think is supposed to be a bowl of cereal but looks more like a hat.
I type back: Already ate! Love you!
It’s a lie, but it can’t be helped. Joni Morgan worries enough for the both of us and then some, and she’s three hours away in a house whose roof I’m still secretly paying to fix, so the least I can do is not add “my daughter skips breakfast” to her list of concerns.
I grab my bag, check my reflection one last time, hair down, minimal makeup, the outfit of a woman who takes this job seriously but also got dressed in four minutes, and head out.
The morning is cold, the kind that bites at your ears and makes your eyes water, and I walk quickly through the three blocks between my apartment and the shuttle stop.
Lykaios Holdings runs a fleet of sleek black shuttles that pick up employees from designated points around the city, which I thought was incredibly generous when I first started and now realize is probably just because the headquarters is located halfway up a mountain and nobody wants to deal with the parking.
The shuttle’s already waiting. I climb on, find my usual seat near the back, and pull out my phone to scroll through absolutely nothing of importance while the bus fills up around me.
This is my life now.
Wake up too early. Lie to my mom about breakfast. Ride a shuttle up a mountain to a job I genuinely love but still can’t believe I have. Come home. Read. Sleep. Repeat.
It’s small. It’s quiet.
And after everything that’s happened with Billy, small and quiet is exactly what I need.
LYKAIOS HOLDINGS IS the sort of place that makes you feel like you’ve accidentally walked into the wrong building.
Every single day.
I’ve been working here for three months, and I still get that little jolt of wait, me?
really? every time the shuttle crests the last hill and the building comes into view.
It’s all glass and dark stone, built into the mountainside like it grew there, and on clear mornings like this one, the windows catch the sunrise and turn the whole structure gold.
Inside, it’s even more intimidating. The lobby alone is bigger than my entire apartment complex, with these impossibly high ceilings and floors made of some stone that seems to have light embedded in it.
Not reflecting light. Containing it. Like someone figured out how to trap starlight in marble, which, given that the company’s founder is a preter, is probably exactly what happened.
The founder.
Prince Alexei Lykaios.
I’ve seen him exactly four times in three months. Which, according to Trish, who has worked here for two years and keeps a running tally on a sticky note inside her desk drawer, makes me statistically blessed.
“Most people go their whole employment without a single sighting,” she told me on my second week, her voice dropping to a whisper even though we were alone in the break room. “He’s like a cryptid. A really, really beautiful cryptid.”
She wasn’t wrong.
The first time I saw him, I was coming out of the elevator on the twelfth floor, balancing a stack of sample boards that were taller than my head.
I didn’t even know he was there until the air in the hallway changed.
That’s the only way I can describe it. One second it was normal office air, slightly too cold from the AC, smelling vaguely of someone’s afternoon coffee. And then it was something else.
I lowered the sample boards just enough to peek over them, and there he was at the far end of the corridor, walking with two people I didn’t recognize.
He was taller than I expected from the company website photos, and lean enough that his dark suit looked like it had been designed specifically for his body, which it probably had.
His hair was blue-black under the corridor lights, and he moved with a grace that made everyone around him look like they were operating at the wrong speed.
He didn’t look at me.
There was no reason for him to look at me. I was a junior designer carrying sample boards. He was the Prince of Atlantis.
But when he passed the intersection where my corridor met his, I caught the briefest glimpse of his profile, the sharp line of his jaw, the aristocratic slope of his nose, and something inside my chest did this awful, traitorous little flip that I recognized immediately because it was exactly how I used to feel when—
No.
No.
I shut that down so fast you’d think my brain had an emergency kill switch specifically designed for this purpose. Which, after Billy, it kind of does.
Because here’s the thing.
I’ve already been the girl who developed feelings for a preter who was way out of her league.
I already played that game, bought the ticket, rode the ride, and got thrown off at the end without so much as a warning sign.
And Billy was a wolf shifter. From a regular pack.
With a modest territory in the foothills.
Prince Alexei Lykaios is a stallion shifter from Atlantis. He holds a seat on the Blood Oval. His bloodline is older than most countries.
If I couldn’t hold onto a boy whose family ran a mid-tier wolf pack, I have absolutely zero business feeling anything, not even a tiny, stupid chest-flip, for a man who is literally supernatural royalty.
So I don’t.
I see him in the hallway, I acknowledge that he is objectively beautiful, the same way I’d acknowledge that the sun is objectively hot, and I move on with my day.
That’s it.
That’s all it is.
MY DESK IS ON THE FOURTEENTH floor, in the design wing of the product development division.
It’s an open-plan space with big windows that look out over the mountains, and I’ve decorated my little corner with a few photos, a small cactus that the office supply catalog described as “virtually unkillable” (which I’m choosing to take as a personal challenge), and a mug that says I’m not a morning person, I’m an always person that I bought at a thrift store for two dollars and which makes no sense but somehow feels accurate.
I like my job. I really, genuinely like it, which still surprises me sometimes, because for the first four months after graduation, I was so convinced that my degree was essentially an expensive piece of paper that I’d started mentally preparing for a lifetime career in coffee.
Not that there’s anything wrong with coffee. I loved working at Beans 4 U. But I didn’t spend four years studying sustainable product design so I could perfect my latte art, even though my latte art was getting pretty good.
Here, I actually get to do what I trained for.
The design team works on packaging and product interfaces for preter-human trade goods, everything from biodegradable shipping containers for temperature-sensitive Caro medical supplies to the user-experience design for new safety devices that preters and humans both need in a post-That Day world.
It’s fascinating. It’s meaningful. And every morning when I sit down at my desk and pull up whatever project I’m working on, there’s this little hum of satisfaction in my chest that tells me I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.
My thesis advisor would probably cry if she could see me now.
She’d also probably ask why I still eat onigiri for lunch three days a week, but that’s between me and my budget.
TRISH FINDS ME AT NOON, which is how most of my favorite parts of the workday begin.
I hear her before I see her, which is funny because Trish Park is the quietest person I’ve ever met.
So quiet you lean in when she talks, because everything she says feels like whatever she’s about to say is a secret she’s trusting you with.
She works in IT security, two floors down, and she’s brilliant in the way that people who are genuinely brilliant often are: completely unaware of it, slightly uncomfortable when anyone notices, and happiest when she’s buried in code and nobody’s looking at her.
But I hear her today because she’s speed-walking, and Trish speed-walking means something has happened that she needs to talk about immediately but can’t say out loud until she’s in a safe zone, ergo, me.
I’m not sure how that happened, honestly.
We met during my first week when I accidentally wandered into the IT floor looking for the supply closet and found her sitting alone in a server room, eating a sandwich and reading something on her phone with an expression that was equal parts dreamy and terrified.
I apologized for interrupting. She said, “It’s fine, I’m just having a crisis.
” And somehow that turned into lunch, which turned into daily lunches, which turned into the closest friendship I’ve had since college.
The crisis, as I later learned, was a boy.
Not a boy.
A man.
A Caro.
Trish, shy, gentle, blushing-if-you-look-at-her-too-long Trish, is secretly dating a blood drinker.