Chapter 5 : The New Name

Asher POV

It should have been easy.

Contain the witness. Identify the threat. Erase the exposure.

That’s how things worked in my line of work—clean, controlled, forgettable.

Rowan Hayes wasn’t the first person to make that impossible.

She’d been in my tower for three days now. Long enough for my staff to start snickering about her, long enough for the press to pick up the trail of the mysterious woman who’d saved Emma Vance. Her face was on half a dozen gossip sites as it was. If the blogs connected her to me, every enemy I’d ever had would smell blood.

I couldn’t allow that to happen.

“Run the models again,” I told Jason. “Every algorithm. Assume whoever tried to hit Emma knows the woman’s name by now.”

Jason stood on the other side of my desk, jaw clenched. “You want me to put her in a safe house?”

“No.” I was not going to be open to negotiation on that point. “She stays here. Where I can see her.”

He didn’t challenge me, though I knew he had questions. Why this one? He knew better than to ask.

When he left, I returned to the window. The rain smeared the city below in low light, bleeding the streetlamps into soft, lethal hues. The tower’s reflection rose behind me—a testament to what could be achieved on glass and silence. I’d sold my soul long ago for this view, and I wasn’t going to let one woman who didn’t know when to run be the end of it.

My phone buzzed, a notification from one of the many anonymous channels my organization used.

Subject: Rowan Hayes. Possible breach.

I opened it. Surveillance stills, taken outside one of her old apartments. Men, waiting by the door with faces half-hidden, posture military.

No insignia. No mistakes.

They weren’t reporters. They were hunters.

I deleted the file and exhaled slowly.

This was not coincidence. She’d been marked.

Which meant keeping her alive was no longer a choice—it was an obligation.

The irony was not lost on me. I’d spent my entire life liquidating liabilities. Now I was going to protect one.

~

By the time I’d made my way to the upper floor, the penthouse was dark save for the low light filtering from Emma’s room. I paused at her door. Rowan’s voice drifted through the crack, low and steady, words I could not make out as she read to Emma in that soft, serious voice of hers.

Emma’s nightmares had stopped since the day Rowan had appeared. That in itself made everything more complicated.

I waited until the sound of the book closing before I knocked.

Rowan turned and a flicker of surprise passed over her features. She was barefoot, hair down, wearing one of the fuzzy sweaters my housekeeper had left for her in the living room. She looked at me like trouble dressed like peace even in that, and I’d known trouble before I met her.

“You should sleep,” she said.

“So should you.” I crossed the threshold, shutting the door behind me. “We need to talk.”

Her shoulders squared. “Ominous much?”

“It is.” I pointed to the empty chair near Emma’s bed. “Sit.”

She did. I remained standing, it was safer that way. “Your name’s already in the ether. You can’t go home, can’t call anyone, can’t be traced to who you were. If they find you, they’ll use you to get to me.”

“So what, I become a prisoner forever?”

“Not a prisoner.” I allowed the untruth to sit between us. “Protected. But that protection comes with terms.”

She folded her arms. “Like what?”

“You’ll get a new identity. Documents, history, everything. You’ll be registered under a new name. Rowan Hayes dies tonight.”

Her breath caught in her throat. “You can’t just kill someone’s identity.”

“Watch me.”

It was not cruelty. It was necessity. Or so I told myself.

Her gaze pinned me to the spot as she searched my face for a hint of levity and found none. “And who in the hell am I to become after you finish erasing who I was?”

I hesitated. I hadn’t been planning that far. The first name that came to mind was not random. It had come from a part of me I didn’t share with anyone.

“Rebecca Harrison,” I said, quietly.

She frowned. “Why that one?”

I could have lied. Said it was clean. Untraceable. Generic. But the truth found its way out of me before I could stop it.

“Because Rebecca means bound,” I murmured. “And Harrison… because once you carry that name, you belong to me.”

Silence swallowed the room.

Rowan rose slowly from the chair, chin up. “You can’t own someone.”

“Everyone is owned by someone,” I said. “Only a matter of who signs the papers.”

A long moment passed where neither of us said anything. Emma slept between us, soft, rhythmic breathing the only proof that the world was still turning. Outside, thunder clapped—slow, distant rumbling like the city itself had exhaled.

Rowan whispered at last, “If I agree to this, can I live?”

“Yes.”

“And if I say no?”

“Then they’ll find you,” I said, deadly simple. “And I won’t be able to protect you next time.”

Something in her expression broke. Not fear, exactly, but something darker, edged with resignation. She looked at me like she was seeing the bars of the cage for the first time and realizing she’d already walked through the open door.

“Rebecca Harrison,” she said, voice flat. “Fine.”

“Good.” I approached her, voice low. “From now on, that’s who you are. The sooner you can believe it, the safer you’ll be.”

She met my gaze, steady. “And if that isn’t the truth?”

“Then,” I said. “it will be.”

~

That night, while my people on the street were wiping Rowan Hayes from every searchable database they could access, I mixed myself a drink and stared at my own reflection in the glass.

I’d built empires from lies for years.

But this one? This was the first lie I wanted to keep.