Chapter 6 : The Bound Name

Rowan POV

The knock was before dawn.

A single, polite rap—too quiet to wake a child, too sharp to be accidental.

Rowan peeled the blanket back and padded to the door. An envelope sat on the floor, white against the marble and a blinking signal. No one waited in the hall. She paused, then ripped it open.

Inside was a driver’s license, a passport, and a single credit card. All newly issued. All with the same name.

Rebecca Harrison.

The picture was her own, and not. The hair a shade darker, the smile a little softer, as though the photographer had caught the fraction of a second when the mask was hesitating between recognition and surrender. Even the background was a blank slate—no speck of the world she’d left behind, nothing to indicate she had once existed as anyone else.

Her throat tightened. This was not protection. It was entombment.

The phone buzzed on the nightstand. Unknown number.

Welcome to your new life. — A.V.

She stared at it until the screen dimmed, the letters a long afterimage in her eyes. For a frozen, surreal moment, she couldn’t decide whether to fling the phone or clutch it to her chest. He knew exactly when she would wake, after all, and whether he should have been surprised or reassured by how he always seemed to be one step ahead—every move, every word, calibrated to control her—was a question without answer. But for a split second, it felt almost like a kind of gravity: the foundation of everything, given shape as threat.

The first impulse was to panic, the second to protest. But when she flipped on the television, the crawl of the morning news made her chest go hollow.

Accident on 43rd and Lexington—woman killed instantly. Witnesses report heroic act.

The picture was fuzzy, but the headline beneath it was clear:

ROWAN HAYES, 27.

She was dead. The anchor’s voice turned to a low, white hum. Rowan sank to the edge of the bed, the phone cold in her hand. The air smelled faintly of lemon polish and ozone, the clean that erased fingerprints. Her heart felt the same: blank, buoyant. A wraith in silk sheets.

She dialed her number. Disconnected. Her email. Locked. Her social media. Deleted. Even her own name, when she typed it into a search engine, only pulled up the accident report. In less than twenty-four hours, every trace of her life had been scrubbed.

Tears stung at the back of her eyes, but she refused to let them fall. She was not going to cry in his tower. Not for him. Not for herself.

The same low voice that had announced the time and her meals earlier sounded through the intercom.

“Breakfast is served, Miss Harrison.”

Miss Harrison. The word was a rasp against her nerves, unfamiliar and oppressive, like a mask pressed too tightly against skin.

She dressed without thought and followed the hall of mirrored panels down to the dining level. The reflections cast a hundred women she didn’t know, all staring back at her. For a second, she hated them all. For thinking they could live this. For thinking they could survive.

The air was faintly scented with espresso and rain. Clouds hovered low over the skyline beyond the glass wall—gray and heavy, implacable. Somewhere in the distance, thunder rolled like a dirge.

Asher was waiting, sleeves rolled, tie loosened. The collar untucked made him look less pristine and somehow more predatory. He did not rise when she entered, merely watched her move across the room as if memorizing the way she walked.

“You’ve been busy,” she said, dropping the envelope on the table between them.

“Efficient.” He corrected. “Efficiency is what keeps people alive.”

“By erasing them?”

His eyes did not waver. “You said you wanted to live.”

“I didn’t say I wanted to disappear.”

He leaned back, studying her. “Sometimes they’re the same thing.”

She wanted to argue, to shout, to fling the passport across the table—but every word caught in her throat. Because the thing she could not look away from was the truth she sensed flickering below his calm: out there, beyond the shield of these walls, Rowan Hayes was already dead. The second she uttered that name again, someone else would finish the job.

“You don’t even sound like yourself,” she whispered. “You talk about life like it’s a contract.”

“It is.” He was unmoved. “You signed it already.”

Her pulse stumbled. “With what?”

He smiled faintly. “With the act that saved my daughter.”

The room stilled. Something flared between them in that moment, a flash of recognition, unease, an undercurrent of emotion that neither of them wanted to name. Her breath came uneven, and she hated that he could see it. For the briefest heartbeat, she thought he would reach for her, and the thought sent a shiver through her she could not quite suppress.

Rowan forced a breath. “I won’t be your pet project.”

“Good.” His voice dropped a register, silken as smoke. “I prefer partners who understand consequence.”

He rose, the movement silent but final. When he passed behind her chair, the space around them narrowed; she could sense the heat of him without a single touch. He smelled faintly of cedar and control—clinical, cold, inescapable.

“You’ll find everything you need in your quarters,” he said, his voice low against her ear. “Wardrobe, keys, communication protocol. The identity only works if you live it.”

She turned just enough to meet his gaze. “And if I refuse?”

“Then Rebecca Harrison dies, too.”

He said it without threat—only certainty. And that terrified her more than the rest combined.

When he left, the silence closed in behind him like water. Rowan stared at the new name on the documents, the letters printed so cleanly over a life she no longer knew.

The woman who had stepped in front of traffic to save a stranger’s child was gone. The one who remained was beginning to understand what it cost to be saved by a man like Asher Vance.

She gathered up the papers, her hands steadier now. “Rebecca Harrison,” she said aloud, testing the name. It was a lie, that much was clear. Yet somehow, she knew she would have to make it true.