CHAPTER TWO
“THE CONVERGENCE EXPO is held annually at The Hive in Miami. The Hive is House Bellecourt’s headquarters, fifty floors, downtown, and the Bellecourts are—”
“Caros,” I say. “Old bloods. Four brothers. Anti-vampire technology leaders.”
Ruby gives me a look that might be approval. It’s hard to tell with Ruby. Her face operates within a very narrow emotional bandwidth, somewhere between “brisk efficiency” and “slightly less brisk efficiency.”
I nod. I’m nodding so much I probably look like one of those bobblehead figures people put on their dashboards.
“You address him as Your Highness. Not sir. Not Prince Alexei. Not—” She pauses, as if considering the full range of things a nervous twenty-two-year-old human might accidentally call the Prince of Atlantis. “Anything else.”
“Your Highness. Got it.”
“When walking, you remain one step behind and to his left. If he stops, you stop. If he gestures for you to speak, you speak clearly and concisely about the product specifications and nothing else. Don’t volunteer personal opinions. Don’t make small talk with delegates. Don’t—”
She’s still going. There are more rules.
So many more rules. Ruby is delivering them at a speed that suggests she normally briefs people who can absorb information at preternatural rates, which I can’t, because I’m a human person with a human brain that is currently devoting approximately sixty percent of its processing power to the single thought: How in the world did I end up here?
Because twenty-four hours ago, I was eating onigiri at my desk and redesigning polymer casings.
That’s my life. That’s what I’m good at.
I’m good at quiet, focused, detail-oriented work that nobody notices until it saves someone’s life in a vampire attack, and I’m very much not good at whatever this is, this Secretary Kim situation where I’m supposed to glide around in heels and anticipate the needs of the world’s most famous preter royal.
All I know is how to design products.
I don’t know how to be this.
“Ruby.”
She blinks.
“I’m a product designer,” I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I feel. “I know the V-Series inside and out. I built the casing prototypes with my own hands. I can talk about moisture resistance and biodegradable polymers in my sleep.”
I take a breath.
“What I can’t do is be Secretary Kim.”
Ruby stares at me.
“It’s a...never mind. It’s a TV reference. The point is, I’m not an executive assistant. I’m going to do my best, but if you’re expecting me to glide around in heels and anticipate his every need before he voices it, I should be honest with you right now that I will absolutely let you down.”
A pause.
Then something extraordinary happens. Ruby’s mouth twitches. Just barely. Just enough that I know, with complete certainty, that somewhere deep inside the crisp navy fortress of Ruby’s professionalism, there is a person who almost smiled.
“The heels have already been arranged,” she says. “Size seven.”
How does she know my shoe size when I never...wait a minute, is that a twinkle in her eye?
“If you can’t be Secretary Kim, then how about Park Min Young in Her Private Life instead?”
My jaw drops. I can’t believe someone like Ruby knows her Kdrama, but before I can get another word out, she’s already pointing to the door. “Please do not keep our CEO waiting. Go.”
Oh, right.
The car’s already waiting when I make it out of the building, and I’m taken straight to a private airfield twenty minutes outside the city.
I spend every one of those twenty minutes reviewing my notes on the V-Series and absolutely not thinking about the fact that I’m about to board a plane with Prince Alexei Lykaios.
I’m not thinking about it.
I’m thinking about adaptive frequency protocols and biodegradable polymer casings and the moisture-wicking test results from last Thursday.
Not the four sightings in three months. Not the way the air changed when he walked past. Not the chest-flip I’d shut down so hard I’d practically given myself emotional whiplash.
Polymers, Zia. Polymers.
The car pulls onto the tarmac, and I see the plane, and my brain goes blank.
It’s not a plane. It’s a statement. Sleek and dark and somehow managing to look fast even while standing still, like a predator crouched on the runway.
The Lykaios Holdings logo gleams in silver on the tail, and everything about it, the polished exterior, the quiet hum of its engines, the way even the ground crew moves around it with a certain reverence, says you are entering a different world now.
Ruby is already walking toward the stairs. I follow, clutching my tablet like a shield.
The interior is...
Okay.
I need a moment.
Because the interior of this plane looks like what would happen if a five-star hotel and an art gallery had a baby and then that baby was raised by someone with impeccable taste and unlimited money.
The seats aren’t seats; they’re wide leather chairs that look like they could swallow you whole.
The lighting is warm and low. The surfaces are some dark wood that gleams like it’s been hand-polished every day for the last century, which, given the owner, it possibly has been.
And there, already seated by one of the wide oval windows, tablet in hand, is Alexei.
The first thing I notice, the thing I always notice, is the presence.
I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s not just that he’s beautiful, although he is, past handsome and into something that doesn’t have a word in English.
Maybe not in any language. His features are too sculpted, too perfectly arranged to belong to anything human.
The blue-black hair. The pale eyes. The jaw that looks like it was designed by someone who understood mathematics on a level the rest of us can’t access.
But it’s more than that.
It’s the way he occupies space. He’s sitting still, utterly still, reading his tablet, and the air around him feels different.
Denser. Charged. Like the atmosphere is holding its breath.
There’s an energy to him that isn’t quite power and isn’t quite danger but lives somewhere between the two, and it reminds me, almost primally, that this man is not human.
That underneath the tailored suit and the aristocratic stillness, he is something enormous and wild.
A stallion. An Atlantean. Something from before human memory.
The ground crew, I notice, don’t look at him directly. They move around the cabin with their gazes lowered, the way you might move through a forest where you know something magnificent is resting among the trees.
I understand the impulse.
I also can’t seem to follow it, because my eyes are stuck on him and I’m having a very stern internal conversation with myself about how this is exactly what I’m not going to do.
“Miss Morgan.”
Ruby gestures to a seat. Not next to Alexei, across from him, on the other side of a low table. A professional distance. A safe distance.
I sit.
He doesn’t look up.
I place my tablet on the table, open my notes, and pretend to read.
Four hours.
I can do four hours.
I CAN’T DO FOUR HOURS.
The problem, and I realize this approximately eleven minutes into the flight, when the seatbelt sign goes off and Ruby disappears into the forward cabin to make calls, is that there is no buffer.
In the office, there are floors. Hallways. Hundreds of employees. The entire infrastructure of a global company acting as a wall between me and the man I’ve spent three months pretending doesn’t make me feel anything.
On this plane, there is a table.
That’s it. One table. And air that smells faintly of that scent I caught once in a corridor, cool and deep, like mountain air over still water, except now it’s everywhere, because the ventilation system on a private jet is apparently very committed to circulating the scent of its owner into every molecule of breathable air.
I stare at my notes. I read the same sentence about polymer tensile strength four times without absorbing a single word.
He’s still reading.
He hasn’t looked at me since I sat down.
Which is fine. Which is correct. Which is exactly how a prince should treat a junior designer who is temporarily serving as his product development representative at an industry expo.
Except that even without looking at me, he’s...there. And the thereness of him, the gravitational weight of his existence three feet away from me, is rewiring my nervous system in ways I don’t have a technical term for.
My skin feels warm. Not flushed, not feverish, just...warm. Like standing in a patch of sunlight that only exists on my side of the table.
My heartbeat is doing this thing where it’s not exactly fast but it’s...aware. Like it’s paying attention to something I haven’t consciously registered.
And there’s this pull. Low and quiet, like a tide. Like my body knows what my mind refuses to acknowledge.
I hate it.
I hate it because I recognize it.
I felt this with Billy.
Not this intensely. Not this...wholly. With Billy, it was a flutter. A spark. A pull that made me giddy and stupid and willing to believe that a boy who kept me secret for two years actually loved me.
This isn’t a flutter. This is an undertow.
And I know, I know, that what I’m feeling isn’t real.
It can’t be. It’s been seven months since Billy ended things, and seven months isn’t long enough for a heart to fully heal, which means my stupid, broken, still-mending heart is doing what broken things do: misfiring.
Sending signals to the wrong places. Interpreting proximity as connection because it’s desperate to feel something other than the ache it’s been carrying since a boy chose money over me.
That’s all this is.
A misfire.
I just need to get through four hours without doing anything embarrassing, and then I’ll be at the Expo, surrounded by hundreds of people, with work to focus on, and this weird, inconvenient, entirely imaginary pull will dissolve back into nothing.
Right?
Right.