Chapter 2

Ella's POV

One sentence, louder than any gavel.

Then he tilted his head and looked down at me, still crumpled on the floor. His gaze was as cold as ever, yet for the first time, it truly landed on me.

I didn't dare lift my head. Look up too fast, and the whole act would fall apart.

I counted my breaths, kept my shoulders trembling at just the right pitch, and waited for those polished shoes to enter my line of sight.

One second.

Two…

His eyes settled on the cufflink at my wrist.

He didn't reach out to touch it. He only looked, and looked for a long time, as if through that small pair of cufflinks he were staring into some place many years ago.

Then he walked over and held out his hand.

It was a hand of clean, defined knuckles, hard-edged, with a faint old scar across the web of the thumb. The veins stood out on the back of it, and the ring that marked who he was sat on his finger, making the whole hand look colder, paler, longer.

He simply held it there before me, palm up, waiting, leaving no room to refuse.

I took it.

The instant our skin met, a faint current I couldn't have named ran up from my fingertips straight into my chest.

His hand was large, my fingers sinking into it like they'd dropped into a mass of iron that had once been through fire and cooled again. He didn't grip right away—just pressed his thumb lightly over my pulse, as if taking my heartbeat, or something else entirely.

The heat of his palm soaked through the skin until my breathing lagged half a beat behind. Something hot crept up the back of my neck.

My knuckles were shaking.

The fear was real. So was the thrill.

Getting close to him was the first step toward changing my fate. And it had all begun with the matches I bought last winter.

Last winter, on the side of a road, I bought every last matchstick from a little girl who was half frozen to death. A month ago, on my birthday, I fished them out and struck one to light the candles on my cake.

In the flare of that light, I saw my future.

I wasn't the true daughter of the Hartford family.

The real Hartford daughter was a girl who'd grown up in the slums. Her name was Mona.

She would appear on the East Coast—and step into my life.

My fiancé, Blake Shaw, would fall for her at first sight. They would fight through everything together and, in the end, have each other. Then Blake would tear my identity apart in public, and the two of them would join forces and have me locked away in an asylum.

At first, I laughed it off. Absurd.

But when I traced it and confirmed the Blake family truly did sponsor a poor scholarship student, I could no longer ignore it.

I went and had a DNA test done. The moment I saw the result on that report, every last bit of my certainty came crashing down.

—I really wasn't Hartford blood after all!

After my identity was exposed, the Hartford family saw me as a disgrace—and even my grandfather, who loved me most, forgot me.

In that asylum in Switzerland—a cold room, walls white enough to hurt the eyes. Every day they strapped me to a chair for shock treatment, and in the instant the current tore through my temples, I couldn't even finish a scream. My teeth clenched so hard they chattered, and I could hear my own bones trembling.

I rotted in there day after day, like a forgotten piece of meat.

That was my ending. If I did nothing, that was exactly how it would end.

I can't die!

I have to live!

That asylum will never see me alive! Never!

I forced down the emotions surging up inside me, then quietly tightened my grip on the hand in front of me.

Right now, all I needed was a shield—and he was the strongest one within reach. With a man like Cole Westmore standing behind me, even if my identity blew up one day, no one would dare lay a finger on me.

I didn't just need his protection. I needed him bound to me, so deep he couldn't cut me loose even if he wanted to. So I had to do whatever it took, by any means, to make him obsessed with me.

Off in the corner, Gabriel's face went grim. His throat worked as if he wanted to say something. But Cole shot him a single flat glance, and Gabriel Gabriel immediately lowered his head and slunk back into the crowd.

Once I was steady on my feet, his hand withdrew, quick as it had come.

A flicker of loss went through me.

I kept up the pitiful, innocent front, head down, chin nearly buried in my collarbone. The crowd parted on its own to let us through. I didn't dare meet a single face, just fixed my eyes on my own wavering shadow on the carpet, inching along one step behind him.

I got into his car. It pulled away from the dock, and the noise of the ship faded behind us.

Inside, I folded myself into the corner of the seat, knees pressed together, hands wrung in my lap, trying to make myself smaller and more harmless.

I pitched my voice soft and timid. "Sir… how—how can I ever thank you."

I kept my eyes lowered, lashes shielding what lay beneath, while my mind raced. He just sat there, doing nothing, and still that pressure rolled over me like water, forcing me to measure even the way I breathed.

He looked at me.

There wasn't a trace of warmth in that scrutiny—it was like an instrument scanning a suspicious object. A layer of cold crawled up my back, but on the surface I was still that harmless little flower, even shrinking a little toward the door, like a skittish animal.

"That thing on your wrist." He spoke suddenly.

Something in me went taut.

"Those belonged to James. You're his daughter."

Too fast.

The flush of triumph barely surfaced before I crushed it back down. All that was left on my face was blank shock, my lashes fluttering in panic, my voice shaking with disbelief. "You… you knew my father?"

He didn't answer right away.

It was a while before he said, flatly, "Your father and I served together. We'd have died for each other, back then."

He paused, then asked, "Your father—is he well?"

I bowed my head, my voice barely more than a breath. "He… passed away. An accident."

Not one word about how.

Cole didn't press. In that moment I distinctly felt the cold on him ease at one corner. He rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb, then quickly settled back into himself and let out a low, quiet sound of acknowledgment.

That single low note was like a sigh he never let out.

"So how," he said, turning back to me, "does a Hartford daughter end up on an auction block?"

Here it was.

I ran the script I'd rehearsed a hundred times over. Wrong boat, hustled up onstage in the confusion, no idea what that place even was.

Halfway through I let my voice catch on purpose, tears welling in my eyes but never falling. I bit my lower lip, let my shoulders quiver, the very picture of someone choking down her hurt.

"I only wanted to see the view tonight."

Head down, damp lashes veiling my eyes, I stole a glance at him under cover of wiping the corner of my eye. His profile was hard-lined, his jaw set tight, that hand still resting on his knee, motionless. No cracks to read. No telling whether he believed me.

Cole didn't push. His eyes stayed on my face for two seconds.

Then, out of nowhere, he spoke. "But this yacht is guarded tight. In all its years, not once has an outsider boarded it by mistake."