Chapter 2

The car idled three blocks from her building. Adrian King sat in the back seat and stared at his own hands.

They were steady. They were always steady. Five years of war had taught him to keep them that way, no matter what burned underneath.

Tonight they were not steady.

He had watched her face when she saw him across the terrace. The hate in it was clean and honest, and it landed harder than anything Mendoza had ever done to him.

Good, he told himself. Let her hate you. Hate keeps her sharp. Hate keeps her alive.

His phone lit up. A message from Reyes, his head of security.

She's already digging. Pulled records on your last four acquisitions before midnight. She's not going to stop.

Adrian almost smiled.

Of course she wasn't. She had never been the kind of woman who stopped.

Five years ago, in a boardroom that smelled like her father's cheap cologne and cheaper fear, a twenty-five-year-old had stood up and called him a coward to his face for the way he was taking her family's company apart piece by piece. He remembered thinking someone should warn her who she was talking to. He never did. She had earned that fire. He wasn't going to be the one who put it out, even if letting it burn meant standing there and taking every word.

He typed back to Reyes. Keep watching her. Don't let her see you.

And if she gets close to the truth?

Adrian's thumb hovered over the screen for a long moment.

Then we move faster than Mendoza can.

He set the phone down and looked out the window at the building where she lived, all glass and light forty floors up, a woman who thought she was fighting him when she was really fighting for her life against people who didn't leave witnesses.

He had rehearsed the offer for weeks. Buy her time. Buy her protection. Wrap it in a hostile takeover so ugly no one would look twice for another reason underneath it.

He hadn't rehearsed the part where she stepped close enough that he could smell her perfume and he forgot, for three full seconds, why he had come at all.

That was the problem with Scarlett Hayes. She had always been able to do that to him. Even at twenty-five, in a room full of lawyers, she had made him forget his own name.

He had spent five years making sure she never found out how much that scared him.

His phone buzzed again.

Reyes: One more thing. Mendoza knows you were at the party tonight.

Adrian's jaw tightened.

That was fast, he typed back.

Too fast, Reyes answered. Someone in her building is talking to them.

Adrian looked up at the lit windows one more time.

Twenty-four hours ago, protecting Scarlett Hayes from a distance had felt like enough.

It didn't feel like enough anymore.

He told the driver to go home. But he kept his eyes on her window until it disappeared behind the skyline, and he made himself a second promise to go with the offer he had made her at the party. Whatever it cost him, whoever he had to become to do it, he was not going to lose another woman to Mendoza Capital.

Not this one.