Chapter 1 — Intern, Not Delivery

They called me “Delivery” on my first day.

The reception desk at Halcyon Media had a certain look about it — the kind of polished marble and orchid arrangements that cost more per square foot than my entire wardrobe, which was saying something, because my entire wardrobe cost eighty-three dollars and included a hoodie I’d owned since college.

“Delivery entrance is around the back, sweetheart,” the receptionist said without looking up from her phone. She had nails like tiny acrylic daggers and a voice that could curdle milk.

“I’m not delivery,” I said. “I’m the new intern.”

She finally looked at me. Up. Down. Then up again, slower, like she was reading the fine print on a bad contract.

“Intern. Right.” She tapped her keyboard with one dagger-nail. “We had a candidate named—” She squinted. “Ellie Carter. That you?”

“That’s me.”

“Huh.” She did not sound convinced. “Weird name. You don’t look like a Carter.”

I did not tell her that I’d legally changed my name last year. That the last name I was born with — Marsh — was worth more than this building, this company, and every orchid in a three-state radius. That my grandfather could buy her nails, her phone, and the marble she was standing on without checking his balance.

I did not tell her any of that, because telling her would have required explaining why I was here at all, and explaining would have required admitting that I’d rather fetch coffee for strangers than attend one more gala where people smiled at my surname instead of my face.

Also, my therapist said I had “avoidance issues around my identity.”

My therapist was right, but he was paid.

“Lanyard’s in the bin,” the receptionist said, jerking a thumb at a box of plastic badges. “Welcome to Halcyon, Intern Carter. May your soul survive HR.”

I grabbed a lanyard, clipped the badge to my chest like armor, and walked to the elevator with the calm of someone who had absolutely no idea that her life was about to be ruined by a blond woman with excellent cheekbones and a vendetta.

The elevator doors opened.

The elevator contained exactly one person: a man in a gray hoodie, cargo pants, and headphones around his neck, holding a laptop under one arm like a medieval peasant clutching his only goat. He was, by any reasonable measure, the most forgettable human being on the island of Manhattan.

He looked at me.

And then — I could have sworn — he listened.

“Your heart’s racing,” he said. Not a question. His voice was low, calm, and old in a way that didn’t match his face, which was young and vaguely handsome in the way of a painting you walk past every day and never quite notice.

“Elevators make me nervous,” I said.

“Elevators,” he repeated, as if tasting the word. “That’s a new one.”

“It’s a classic, actually. Elevator + stranger = anxiety. Textbooks.”

He tilted his head. “And the part where you recognized my cuff link?”

My heart — which had, admittedly, been racing — stopped.

His cuff link. Small, silver, nearly hidden under the hoodie sleeve. An emblem I hadn’t seen since I was a child, in my grandfather’s study, in a book that was supposed to be a myth.

A crescent moon swallowing a falling star.

The sigil of a house that had gone extinct three hundred years ago.

I looked at his face. He looked at mine. The elevator dinged.

“Floor twelve,” he said pleasantly. “IT’s on fourteen, but something tells me you’re not here for the printers.”

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

“I’m just a temp,” I said.

The elevator doors closed, and the man smiled the slow smile of someone who has just won a bet he made three hundred years ago.

For the record, I’d like to state that I am not an idiot.

I am, in fact, the sole heir to Marsh Global, a conglomerate so large that our quarterly earnings calls have their own cable coverage. I sat in on my first board meeting at age nine, holding a juice box and correcting the CFO’s spreadsheet. By eighteen, I’d anonymously turned a dying biotech stock into a nine-figure windfall, just to see if I could.

And yet here I was, at twenty-three, wearing an eighty-three-dollar wardrobe, about to fetch coffee for strangers, because I’d decided, in a moment of profound and slightly petulant genius, that I wanted one year of real life.

One year of earning something on my own. One year of being Ellie Carter: intern, nobody, free.

My grandfather had called it “a charmingly self-destructive phase.” My grandmother had called it “the best decision you’ve made since you stopped dating that tennis pro.” My security team had called it “a nightmare, Ms. Marsh, please reconsider.”

I’d won. I always won. That was the problem, really — when you always win, you forget what it feels like to actually want something.

So: Halcyon Media, an affiliate of an affiliate of Marsh Global — a fact I’d carefully verified and then carefully ignored, because if I thought too hard about the fact that I was technically interning at my own company, I would have to admit that my “one year of real life” had a very real safety net underneath it.

The elevator let me out on twelve. The floor was open-plan, gray, humming with the sound of keyboards and the specific despair of people who haven’t had their coffee yet.

And standing at the glass door of the conference room, clipboard in hand, wearing a white blouse that cost more than my rent, was a woman who looked at me the way a cat looks at a mouse that has wandered into its territory.

“Ah,” she said, with the brightness of a knife being sharpened. “You must be the new intern. I’m Vanessa Langley. I’m the one who decides whether your internship here is a pleasant memory or a cautionary tale.”

She smiled. It did not reach her eyes.

I smiled back. It reached mine, because I was very good at smiling, and because I’d already decided that this woman — this beautiful, expensive, clearly miserable woman — was not worth the energy it took to dislike her.

“I’m Ellie,” I said. “Ellie Carter. Just a temp.”

“Mm.” Vanessa’s gaze swept my hoodie like a cleaning crew assessing a stain. “We’ll see about that.”

The phone on her desk buzzed. She picked it up, listened, and her face did something interesting — a flicker of recognition, quickly smoothed.

“Right. Yes. He’s on his way up.” She hung up and looked at me with fresh, hungry interest. “Actually, Intern Carter, you’re in luck. The building’s new owner is touring the floor today. Make yourself useful — fetch the coffee. And don’t embarrass us.”

“The building’s new owner?”

“Marsh Global bought Halcyon outright last quarter,” Vanessa said, like I should have known, like everyone should have known. “The family keeps a presence. Apparently one of them visits personally.” She rolled her eyes, a gesture of magnificent privilege for a woman whose entire salary couldn’t cover the penthouse she claimed to own. “Rich people. They can’t help themselves.”

I did not point out that she’d just spent forty seconds telling me how rich people can’t help themselves while standing under a chandelier she couldn’t afford. I did not point out that I was, technically, one of “them.”

I was just a temp.

I went to fetch the coffee.

Behind me, the elevator dinged, and I heard the low, amused voice of a man who had, three hundred years ago, been a medieval lord, and who had just decided that watching me fetch coffee for Vanessa Langley was going to be the most entertaining thing he’d done in centuries.

“Fascinating species,” Nico Volkov murmured to himself, stepping off the elevator with a box of spare keyboards.

Then he smiled, and the smile was the kind of smile that makes empires nervous.