Chapter 1

On my very first day at the Hall Group, I received a death warrant in my new corporate inbox.

The email came from an anonymous, unlisted address, featuring a profile icon I knew all too well—a pitch-black sun. The message contained only seven words:

Don’t let me find you, you liar.

My fingers froze against the plastic edge of my new employee badge, my palms slick with a sudden, icy sweat.

The sender was Dominic. To the global financial market, he was the ruthless, iron-fisted billionaire pulling the strings of a multi-billion-dollar empire.

To me, he was the man whose heart I had systematically broken two weeks ago when I sent a single, agonizing "I’m sorry" and permanently deleted my account.

For three years, I had been his digital ghost. I was the one who stayed up until 3:00 AM listening to his gravelly voice untangle cutthroat corporate takeovers. I was the one who spent hours at duty-free counters, sniffing dozens of testers until I found the perfect blend of oud and bergamot, eventually mailing the custom cologne to his private estate.

But the woman he loved—the woman whose face and name I had stolen—was Chloe.

Chloe was real. She was my high school tormentor, the golden girl who spent three years orchestrating a vicious smear campaign that ultimately cost my mother her job as her family’s head housekeeper.

When I was eighteen, consumed by a quiet, burning rage, I used Chloe’s photos and name to create an online persona, intending to ruin her reputation by acting out online. I never expected Dominic to crash into my digital trap.

I never expected a man who looked like a lethal weapon in news broadcasts to whisper intoxicating, possessive promises into his microphone, calling me his "sweet obsession" in the dead of night.

But as his obsession grew, so did his demands to meet in person.

Two weeks ago, I stood before my bathroom mirror, looking at my plain, exhausted face—worn down by working three part-time jobs just to survive college. I looked at myself, thought of Chloe’s effortless, high-society elegance, and the illusion shattered.

Fairytales don't belong to girls like me. Dominic loved a photograph. I was just a scholarship kid lucky enough to land a bottom-tier internship at his headquarters.

"Everyone, on your feet. Executive floor is inspecting."

The sharp, grating voice of Davies, the operations manager, cut through the bullpen like a whip.

I instantly slammed my laptop shut, shoved my phone into the desk drawer, and stood rigid along with other interns.

My desk was buried in the absolute furthest corner of the room, partially obscured by a massive, overgrown parlor palm.

Then came the sound. The distinct, authoritative click of bespoke leather soles striking the dark green marble floor.

I kept my chin down, my eyes tracking a pair of custom, polished oxfords moving past the cubicles. The sharp, flawless crease of his charcoal-gray trousers caught the fluorescent light—a specific Italian wool blend I had personally selected and sent to him via a private tailor link last autumn.

Dominic.

He was broader in person than on the covers of Forbes, radiating a suffocating, gravitational pressure that demanded submission. His jawline looked as though it had been chiseled out of granite, his lips pressed into a hard, unforgiving line. He looked less like an executive and more like a predator surveying an enclosure.

"Mr. Hall, this is our new intake of operations interns," Davies droned, his spine bent in a perpetual, pathetic bow. "All top-tier Ivy League graduates."

Dominic didn't utter a word. He didn't even blink. He simply marched forward, his stride measured and lethal.

But as he reached the front row, Chloe stepped out. She had positioned herself flawlessly, wearing a pastel pink designer knit dress that hugged every curve.

Clack.

A sharp, metallic snap echoed through the silent room.

A heavy sapphire cufflink detached from Dominic’s sleeve, bounced twice on the linoleum, and rolled precisely to the toe of Chloe’s nude Christian Louboutin pumps.

The entire department held its breath.

Dominic halted. His gaze drifted downward, locking onto the glinting piece of silver.

Beside him, Stone, his chief of staff, instinctually reached down to retrieve it. Dominic raised a single, leather-gloved hand, stopping his assistant dead in his tracks.

Chloe seized the moment. With the practiced elegance of a pageant queen, she sank into a fluid, graceful bend. She scooped up the cufflink and offered it to him on her open palms, a delicate, perfectly engineered blush rising along her cheekbones.

"Your cufflink, Mr. Hall."

Dominic didn't take it.

Instead, he took a slow, heavy step forward, invading her personal space. That intoxicating wave of oud and bergamot flooded the air, traversing the distance of the room to sting the back of my throat. My hands curled into tight fists inside my pockets.

Dominic stared at Chloe’s face.

He stared at the exact features he had worshiped on his phone screen for over a thousand days. His dark eyes burned with a terrifying, unreadable turbulence—a mixture of cold fury and profound, shattering shock.

Chloe’s composure began to fray under his intensity. Her long eyelashes fluttered nervously. "Mr. Hall?" she prompted, her voice dropping to a seductive purr.

Dominic finally moved. His long fingers brushed against her open palm as he took the silver hardware, the rough texture of his skin making her gasp softly.

Then, he spoke. He used that exact, gravelly baritone that had vibrated against my eardrums through my headphones for three years, uttering a single name:

"Chloe."

"Yes, it's me. I'm Chloe," she breathed, her voice practically dripping with vanity and triumphs.

Dominic didn't say another word. He gave her one last, piercing look—a glance so icy it sent a shiver straight down my spine—before turning on his heel and sweeping out of the department, his entourage scrambling to keep up.

The moment the executive elevator doors slid shut, Davies erupted into a frantic squeal. "Oh my god, Chloe! The CEO knows you? He knew your name!"

The bullpen dissolved into chaos as colleagues swarmed her, throwing out envy and cheap flattery.

Chloe drank it in, lifting her chin as she looked across the sea of cubicles. Her eyes pierced through the leaves of the parlor palm, locking directly onto me.

She knew what she was doing.

In high school, when she discovered my sketchbook filled with practice drawings of her face, she had ripped the pages out in front of the cafeteria, calling me a pathetic, faceless stalker. Now, she wasn't going to expose me. She was going to ride my lie straight into high society.

"Avery," Chloe said, striding over to my desk, her voice sweet but laced with venom. "Davies said you’re our most reliable worker. Go up to the corporate archive on thirty and bring down the last five years of physical audit ledgers. A little manual labor suits you."

A few colleagues snickered nearby.

I didn't argue. I simply stood up and smoothed down my cheap slacks. I knew exactly what Chloe was thinking—she wanted to bury me under administrative grunt work, to keep me compliant and silent.

But she didn't know Dominic the way I did.

She didn't know he was a man who possessed a pathological hatred for deception. She thought she had just stolen a golden ticket, but she had no idea about the demanding, hyper-specific psychological boundaries the online "Chloe" had established with him.

She couldn't even quote a single line of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. How was she going to navigate a man who fell in love with a woman who could dismantle hedge-fund strategies by text?

I piled the heavy ledgers into my arms and stepped into the service elevator. Looking at my reflection in the brushed steel—plain, invisible, but entirely calm—I felt a dark, anticipatory thrill.

But as the elevator doors groaned open on the top floor, my heart violently misfired.

The corridor was deserted, save for one man. Dominic hadn't returned to his office.

He was leaning against the glass facade, an unlit cigarette resting between his knuckles. His predatory black eyes cut across the expanse of the hallway, piercing through the glass doors, locking directly onto my face.

Did that anonymous email mean he was searching for a ghost, or did he already know exactly which IP address to hunt?