Chapter 2: Poison & Champagne (1)

Three months later, they move out of the basement and into a glass apartment in midtown Manhattan, where the elevator opens directly into the living room and the whole of the city lies glittering below like a promise they haven't earned yet.

The first night, Lila stands at the window for an hour without saying anything. Kane comes up behind her and puts his chin on her shoulder.

"Penny for your thoughts."

"I'm doing math," she says. "I'm trying to figure out if the view costs more than the rent."

"The view is free. That's the whole point of the view."

"That's the most bourgeois sentence you've ever said, and you said it in a hoodie."

He grins and kisses her temple. "Tomorrow I buy a suit."

On moving day, Lila stacks the mac-and-cheese boxes into a little tower on the kitchen island and photographs it. She sends it to him with one caption: demolition keepsake.

Three dots. Then: I bought it back.

She blinks at the screen. ?

A screenshot comes back. The venture fund that rejected him seventeen times—the same one—has just reached out on its own. Not with a rejection. With an invitation. They want to meet about a Series A.

Lila stares at the signature block until her eyes sting. She'd had a message half-typed for the last three days, and it said: we need to talk about London. She deletes it word by word, and sends: Then I want expensive food.

"Done," he writes back, and she can hear the smile in his thumbs.

He takes her to a place in the Village where the menu has no prices, and she orders the most expensive thing out of spite, and he watches her eat it like it's the best show he's ever seen. She's twenty years old. She thinks this is what winning feels like.

The morning of the Series A pitch, Lila has to physically stop herself from going with him.

"I'm a distraction," she says at the door, arms crossed. "I'll pace a hole in your floor."

"You're the reason I'll walk out of there with my heart rate below emergency," he says. "Stay. Trust the deck."

She stays. She does not trust the deck. She paces a hole in the living room, checks her phone forty times, and at 4:17 the door opens and Kane walks in with a look on his face she has never seen. The fire in his eyes is burning so bright it's almost white.

"We got it," he says. "We got the Series A."

She's across the room and in his arms before he finishes the sentence, and they spin in the middle of the glass apartment like idiots, like kids who've just been told the monster under the bed is gone. He lifts her off the ground, her borrowed confidence, his borrowed suit, both of them laughing.

"Seventeen rejections," she says into his shoulder. "Seventeen."

"Seventeen," he agrees. "You kept count."

"Somebody had to. You were too busy being unbendable."

He sets her down, holds her face in his hands, and kisses her forehead with a tenderness that makes her chest ache. "I'm not unbendable, Lil. I just bend toward you."

It's the most romantic thing he's ever said. She files it away. She keeps everything.

⁂

The first circle gala is a monster that eats money.

Lila is wearing a borrowed Valmont—a friend-of-a-friend's, hemmed twice, still a size off—and her palms are sweating through the silk. The venue is a private club in the fifties with ceilings like a cathedral and champagne towers like architecture. Every person in the room has a net worth with more commas than Lila has seen in her life, and they all move like they were born to it.

She is not. She knows it. She's holding a glass of champagne like a shield and trying to look like she belongs, and that's exactly when the universe decides to test her.

She turns to let a waiter pass. Her elbow catches the shoulder of a man in an immaculate suit. Red wine leaves his glass with surgical precision and lands across the custom shoe of a hedge fund titan.

The room goes silent. The champagne tower keeps its breath.

The titan looks down at his shoe. Then at her. "Which big name brought you in tonight?"

Lila blinks. She can feel forty pairs of eyes on her, measuring her, waiting for her to shrink. She doesn't shrink.

The thing about Lila Voss, the thing nobody in this room knows yet, is that she spent the first twenty years of her life being the wrong thing in the wrong room. The poor kid in the honors seminar. The scholarship girl at the networking mixer. The one whose clothes were always slightly wrong and whose posture was always slightly too straight, because she'd learned early that if you can't afford armor, you make your spine do the work.

So she doesn't panic. She doesn't apologize six times. She looks the most feared man in the room dead in the eye, and she does the one thing nobody in this room has the reflexes for anymore.

She tells the truth.

"I brought myself in," she says.

The silence sharpens. Someone by the bar actually stops pouring.

Then the titan laughs—a real laugh, surprised out of him—and says, "Interesting. My office. Tomorrow."

His name is Cyrus Hale. He is the most feared money manager in New York. It will take Lila three years to understand what she just did, and another year to learn how rare it is that he laughs like that.