CHAPTER THREE — TEN YEARS (2)

"I'm telling you to find every copy of that document still in circulation and kill it."

Jason stared at him.

"I want it gone by noon," Kaelan said. "Every outlet. Every archive. Every private group chat with more than three people in it. I want the story to evaporate so completely that the only people who remember it are the ones who saw her destroy it on live television."

"That's... that's helping her."

"Yes."

"You're helping her, and you want her to think you hate her."

"I want her to be safe, Jason. What she thinks of me is her business."

Jason opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. And finally, with the profound resignation of a man who had long ago given up on understanding his employer, said: "You're going to burn down every empire that touches her, and you're going to do it silently, and you're going to resent her for not thanking you. That's not a rivalry, boss. That's a whole personality disorder."

"Shut up and delete the document."

"On it." Jason turned to go, then paused. "Also, for the record? She did look good up there."

The pen in Kaelan's hand snapped in half.

"Noted," he said, through his teeth.

* * *

Ten years ago, it rained the way it only rains in New York in September—hard, sudden, and without apology.

Elena Valentine was seventeen, and she was running.

She had run from her father's office, from the boardroom, from the Valentine family's latest masterpiece of parental disappointment. She had run until her lungs burned and her city shoes drowned, and then she had run some more, because running was the only thing that had ever made sense.

The alley near the East River was dark and smelled like wet garbage and bad decisions.

She saw the boy because he glowed.

Not literally. But there was a quality to him—pale, furious, braced against the brick like he expected the building to fall on him and would welcome it—that caught the streetlight and held it, the way certain people hold a room.

He was bleeding.

A lot.

And he was still standing.

"You should go," he said, before she could speak. His voice was young and rough and already exhausted. "There's nothing for you here."

"There's a lot here," she said, stepping closer. "There's you. Bleeding. On purpose, it looks like."

"It's not on purpose."

"Then why aren't you—" She stopped. Looked at his hands. At the bruises on his knuckles. At the way he held himself, like a man bracing for the next blow. "Oh. Oh. You're hiding."

"I'm not hiding. I'm—" He stopped. Swallowed. "I'm not hiding."

"Okay." She sat down on the wet pavement beside him, heedless of her dress, and pulled a crumpled pack of bandages from her pocket—she always carried them, a habit from a childhood of falling. "You're not hiding. You're just standing in an alley in a thunderstorm, bleeding, refusing to accept medical assistance. Very manly. Very tragic. May I touch your hand?"

"No."

"Great." She took his hand anyway. "I'm going to need you to hold still while I do something about this, because if you bleed out in an alley, I'm going to be very annoyed with you forever."

He stared at her.

"You're insane," he said.

"I'm efficient. There's a difference."

And then—because she was seventeen, and because he was bleeding, and because the rain was making everything unreal anyway—Elena Valentine pressed her palm to his cheek and whispered, "You're going to be okay."

The boy went very still.

His hand—the one she'd bandaged—turned, and his fingers closed around her wrist. Gently. Like she was something fragile. Like he couldn't quite believe she was real.

"Why," he said, and his voice cracked on the word, "would you help me?"

"Because no one else was going to," she said, simply. "And you looked like you needed someone to. Is that okay?"

He laughed. It was a broken, rusty sound, like something that had been locked away for years, and it made the rain seem smaller.

"People like me," he said, "don't get that."

"People like you?"

"Don't." He shook his head. "You'll catch what I've got."

"I've already caught it." She grinned at him, soaked and ridiculous and entirely too bright for the alley. "I'm not going anywhere."

And the boy—the boy with the bleeding hands and the ruined laugh and the eyes the color of a coming storm—looked at her like she was the only light he had ever seen.

He pulled a small, rough thing from his pocket. A wooden star, carved with hands that had clearly never held a knife.

"For my mother," he said. "Before she died. I carved it for her. She never got to see it."

Elena's chest hurt.

"People like me don't get stars," he said, and shoved it into her hands, hard, like it burned him. "Take mine."

"Your mother's star? I can't—"

"You're the only person who's ever looked at me like I was worth one." He stood, suddenly, all six-foot-something of rain-soaked boy, and looked down at her with those storm eyes. "Go home, golden girl. Before you catch what I've got."

"What's your name?" she asked.

"It doesn't matter."

"It matters to me."

He smiled—the first real smile she'd seen from him, cracked and hopeless and alive—and said, "It matters to me too. But I can't. I'm sorry. I can't."

And then he walked out of the alley, into the rain, into the dark, and was gone.

Elena Valentine sat on the wet pavement for a long time, holding a dead woman's carved star in her hands.

And somewhere across the city, a boy who would one day own everything and fear nothing walked home bleeding, and said her words over and over until they stopped sounding like a stranger's and started sounding like his only religion: