Chapter Two · I Don't Need Saving. I Need Freedom. (1)

The room had gone quiet around him. Not polite-quiet — that hush that happens when something dangerous walks into a party and everyone pretends they don't see it.

I felt him cross the floor before I saw him do it. Which was strange, because he made no sound at all. No footsteps on the marble. No shift of fabric. He moved like the air itself had learned to step aside for him, and I'd have written it off as gala theatrics if my own heartbeat hadn't gone loud in my ears.

Up close, Kael Ashford was worse than the rumors.

He was beautiful in the way a knife is beautiful: efficient, elegant, and absolutely not for handling carelessly. Up close, his eyes weren't dark — they were black, truly black, with no color I could name, and they were looking at me like I was a puzzle he'd been waiting a very long time to solve.

"Maren Cole," he said. His voice was low, unhurried, and it went straight down my spine and sat there. "You finished Reyes's house in record time, under budget, and you spent three days arguing with his contractor about a light well. You won."

I blinked. "How do you know that?"

"Everyone in this room knows something about you tonight," he said, and something almost like amusement flickered across his face. "I simply know more."

"You don't know me."

"I know you design rooms where people learn to breathe again." He said it so plainly, so matter-of-factly, that my chest did something complicated. "That's not a skill. That's a mercy. And mercies are rare."

I should have walked away. I knew it the way you know a cliff is a cliff. Instead I heard myself say, sharp and defensive, the way I always got when someone got too close: "Is that your thing? Collecting information on people like they're assets?"

"No." He tilted his head, studying me. "That would be tedious. I collect information on exactly one person at a time. Right now, it's you."

"You're going to have to do better than creepy."

"I'm not trying to be anything with you." He said it without heat, without games, and somehow that was worse. "I'm trying to figure out why someone who builds light for a living looks like she hasn't slept anywhere safe in years."

The words hit like a slap to a bruise I'd been guarding. My smile — the one I wore like armor, the one that had gotten me through a thousand family dinners — came up automatic, bright, hollow. "That's quite a line, Mr. Ashford. Do you do this to all your contractors?"

"No." He was watching me with a stillness that felt almost physical, like a hand held an inch from my skin, waiting. "I don't do this at all. I've never done this. You're the first."

Something in his tone made the hair stand up on my arms. There was no flirtation in it. No game. Just a fact, delivered with the flat certainty of someone who'd lived long enough to stop lying about what he wanted.

"I don't need saving," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt. "I need freedom. And I've learned the hard way that the two of you — men like you, people like me — they're not the same thing."

Something shifted in his face. Not disappointment. Recognition. Like I'd just said something he'd been waiting years to hear someone say out loud.

"I know," he said. "That's the first thing I liked about you."

The room chose that moment to cough us back into reality. A man in an expensive suit materialized at his elbow — tall, gray-eyed, carrying a stillness that matched Kael's like a fingerprint — and murmured something against Kael's ear. Kael's expression didn't change, but the temperature around us dropped by a degree.

"Silas," Kael said, without looking at him, "tell Pritchard his guest is making a scene. And tell him I said the Bel Air acquisition goes through on my timeline, not his girlfriend's ego."

Pritchard. I knew that name. Elliot Pritchard, Ashford's head of acquisitions — and on his arm, across the room, wearing a dress that probably cost more than my studio's rent for a year, was Mara Quinn. My ex-colleague. The woman who'd stolen my biggest contract at my old firm, then made sure everyone in the industry heard it was her idea.

Mara had spotted me. Of course she had. She was crossing the floor toward me with champagne and a smile like a knife in a birthday cake.

"Maren Cole," she cooed, loud enough for the nearby crowd to tune in. "My God. They let anyone in now, don't they? How's the little studio? I heard you're one client away from folding."