Chapter 2

Claudia Sims POV

Six years before I stood in that courtroom and watched the man I had once loved being led away in handcuffs, I had walked out of a different kind of room with a different kind of weight in my chest. The boardroom of Sims Capital had smelled of polished mahogany and the faint, clean scent of victory. I had just closed the deal that would formally value the empire I had built at nine billion dollars-a number so large it felt abstract, like trying to hold the ocean in the palm of my hand. Fourteen months of hostile takeovers conducted in the grey hours between midnight and dawn, when Tokyo was waking and New York was finally sleeping. Lawyers who billed more per hour than most people earned in a month, their voices a constant murmur in my earpiece as I negotiated terms that would reshape entire industries. And through all of it, Archer Dillard had been my shadow, my second set of eyes, the one person in the world who understood that the woman the business press called "the Queen of Quiet Capital" was also just a woman who forgot to eat lunch and sometimes talked to her houseplants.

That afternoon, Archer had poured two glasses of vintage Krug into crystal flutes that probably cost more than the first car I ever owned. He had handed me one, his grey eyes-the color of storm clouds gathering over the East River-holding mine with an intensity that made my breath catch in a way I had long since trained myself to ignore.

"Now go live in it," he'd said. His voice was low and rough, the voice of a man who had spent too many years in too many boardrooms, fighting wars that other people started.

I had looked at him then-really looked at him-and felt something dangerous stir in the space between my ribs. Archer Dillard was not a handsome man in the way that magazine covers defined handsomeness. His features were too sharp, his jaw too severe, his presence too intense for the kind of easy charm that Ashton Bowers would later wield like a weapon. But there was a gravity to him, a stillness, that made you want to lean in closer. He was the kind of man who would never chase you, never beg, never raise his voice. He would simply stand there, solid as bedrock, and wait for you to realize that he had been your harbor all along.

But I wasn't ready for harbors. I was thirty-four years old and I had spent my entire adult life building, acquiring, conquering. I had never been loved for me-for the woman who burned toast and cried at documentaries about endangered sea turtles and secretly wished someone would just hold her hand without calculating what it might cost them. I wanted to know what that felt like. Just once. Before I became too hard, too sharp, too much of what the world had made me.

"I'm leaving," I told Archer, the words scraping against my throat like broken glass. "For a year. Maybe two."

He didn't ask why. He didn't tell me I was making a mistake, though I could see the knowledge of it written in the tight set of his jaw. Instead, he reached into the inner pocket of his jacket-a jacket that had been tailored to fit him like armor-and pulled out a small black phone. It was an encrypted device, the kind that couldn't be traced or tapped or hacked by any known technology that didn't have a government seal on it.

"If you ever need me-ever-you call," he said, pressing the phone into my palm. His fingers brushed against mine, warm and deliberate, and the contact sent a current up my arm that I forced myself to ignore. "I don't care if it's been six years or sixty. You call."

Then he turned his back to me. His silhouette was sharp against the floor-to-ceiling windows, the falling dusk painting the Manhattan skyline in shades of amber and rose. And he said the words I would replay a thousand times in the years that followed, the words that would become a kind of prayer I whispered to myself on nights when the loneliness was so vast I thought it might swallow me whole.

"I'll keep the seat warm. For when you come back."

I slipped the phone into my purse, next to a lipstick I never wore and a receipt for coffee I had bought three weeks ago, and I walked out of that boardroom. I walked toward a different life. Toward a man named Ashton Bowers, who thought I was a freelance art consultant with a modest inheritance from a grandmother who had never existed. Toward a version of myself that I had constructed out of half-truths and hopeful lies.

That was my first mistake. But it would not be my last.

The invitation arrived on a Thursday, slipped beneath the door of the Upper East Side apartment Ashton had insisted we share. Cream-colored cardstock, thick as a communion wafer, embossed with gold leaf that caught the light like captured fire.

The Bowers Foundation for the Arts, in partnership with the Metropolitan Museum, requests the pleasure of your company at the unveiling of the Artemis Collection. Curated by Bianca Burks. Sponsored by Bowers Media.

I read it three times, my fingers tightening around the heavy paper until the edges bit into my skin. Curated by Bianca Burks. The name sat there, smug and gleaming, like a stain on silk.

I had curated the Artemis Collection. Every single piece-from the Cycladic figurines on loan from a private collection in Athens, their marble features worn smooth by four thousand years of wind and salt, to the bronze stag that had taken eighteen months to authenticate through forensic metallurgy and sleepless nights cross-referencing obscure academic journals in three languages-had been sourced by me, negotiated by me, funded by me through a labyrinth of shell companies and anonymous trusts so complex that it had taken a team of lawyers three weeks just to map the ownership structure. Bianca Burks, an actress whose primary qualification was an Instagram following cultivated through carefully angled bikini photos and a talent for attaching herself to men with more power than sense, had contributed nothing. Not a single hour of research. Not a single dollar. Not a single coherent thought about the difference between Hellenistic and Archaic.

And my fiancé, Ashton Bowers, had signed off on it without a second thought.

"It's a branding opportunity," he had explained, his voice smooth and reasonable, the voice he used when he was managing me like one of his media properties. "Bianca's face sells tickets, Claudia. You know how this works. It's just business."

I had swallowed my objections. I had swallowed them the way I had swallowed so many things over six years-my pride, my instincts, my own name. I told myself it was temporary. I told myself that love required sacrifice, that making myself small was the price of being chosen. I told myself so many lies that I had forgotten what the truth tasted like. It tasted, I would later realize, like the salt of my own tears on a pillow he never noticed was wet.