I secretly placed a note under a billionaire’s bottle of whiskey, saying, “Don’t drink it”… He was shocked, and I cleverly knocked the glass away, giving him an excuse to drag me out by the wrist. An hour later, I learned that his family had been hunting for my bottle for years. Just as he was about to tell me the truth, the real trouble began…

“Boss. We found Neal.”

Adrian hit the speaker. “Alive?”

A pause.

“No.”

The word fell into the room like a dropped knife.

“Where?” Adrian asked.

“Two blocks from the Ledger. Alley off Fifty-Second. Execution style. Also, Rowan’s apartment was hit.”

My entire body went cold.

Adrian’s head turned toward me.

“Explain.”

“I can’t,” I said, because I truly could not breathe for a second. “Nobody should even know where I live.”

Jace continued. “Door kicked in. Place tossed. Looks like they were searching for something.”

“For what?” I whispered.

No one answered, because that was the worst part.

If your home is destroyed, you at least want the dignity of understanding why.

Adrian pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose, thinking. When he lowered his hand, the decision in his face was already made.

“You’re staying here tonight.”

I let out a hollow laugh. “You say that like I have a vote.”

“You don’t.”

“Charming.”

“You can sleep angry,” he said. “You’ll sleep alive.”

Then he looked at me with that same terrible calm he had worn at the bar.

“Whatever this is, Rowan, it started before that drink touched the counter. Which means if someone tore apart your apartment tonight, they were not trying to silence a bartender. They were looking for a Hale.”

I did not sleep much.

It turns out sleeping in a billionaire’s penthouse while armed men rotated outside the door is terrible for restfulness.

At three in the morning, I gave up and wandered into the kitchen barefoot in one of the white shirts a housekeeper had left in the guest suite. The city lights beyond the glass made Manhattan look almost soft, which felt offensive.

Adrian was already there.

Of course he was.

Men like him probably negotiated acquisitions in their dreams.

He stood by the window in black trousers and a dark Henley, one hand wrapped around a coffee mug. Without the suit jacket and public armor, he looked more dangerous, not less. Easier to imagine him doing something decisive with his bare hands.

“Do billionaires not sleep,” I asked, “or is this a seasonal thing?”

He glanced over. “Do women who lie on employment forms usually lecture their hosts at dawn?”

“That sounds like a yes.”

To my surprise, he almost smiled.

“Coffee?” he asked.

“I’m not drinking anything you hand me.”

“It’s from a sealed machine.”

“So was civilization, once.”

That time he did smile, briefly, and the effect was disorienting enough that I hated it on principle.

He poured coffee into a second mug anyway and left it on the island, then returned to the window.

“I had Helix files pulled overnight,” he said after a moment. “Your father’s death was handled internally before the acquisition. The records are thin.”

“Thin is rich-people language for buried.”

“Yes.”

I wrapped my arms around myself.

“What aren’t you saying?”

He set his mug down.

“Tomorrow night is the Vale Foundation Winter Gala at my family estate in the Hudson Valley. The board of Helix will be there. So will Graywatch. The sale terms get finalized the morning after.”

I stared at him.

“You think the poisoning is connected to the sale.”

“I think timing is never an accident.”

“And what exactly does that have to do with me?”

He turned from the window fully then, and for the first time that night he looked less like a man in command and more like someone willing to admit the shape of the problem.

“You smelled something in one second that professionals missed. You recognized a signature tied to your father’s death. Somebody ransacked your apartment after you warned me. Which means either you know something valuable, or they believe you might.”

My throat tightened.

“I don’t.”

“Maybe not consciously.”

The room was very quiet.

Then he said the sentence that changed everything.

“Come to the gala with me.”

I laughed in his face.

He did not.

“You cannot be serious.”

“I rarely am for fun.”

“Absolutely not.”

“If you stay in Manhattan, they will keep hunting you. At the estate I can control the perimeter.”

“And what am I, exactly, at this gala? Your traumatized plus-one?”

His gaze held mine for half a beat too long.

“My fiancée.”

I just stared.

Then I laughed harder.

The problem was that he still did not look like he was joking.

“You have lost your mind.”

“Publicly attaching you to me does two things,” he said. “First, it puts you inside my security circle. Second, it forces whoever made a move last night to react while I’m watching.”

“You want to use me as bait.”

“I want to keep you where I can protect you.”

“That is the same sentence in a better suit.”