Chapter 1 - The Name on Television
My phone slipped from my hand when Adrian Moretti said my name on national television.
Emma Hayes.
The host had asked whether the notorious Chicago businessman had ever been rejected, and he had answered with a memory I thought belonged only to us.
Ten years earlier, at seventeen, I had told a quiet boy to stop dreaming when he confessed he loved me.
I had blocked his number before he could explain what he meant.
Then his father was murdered, Adrian disappeared from school, and the world gradually learned to fear the Moretti name.
In the television studio, he looked immaculate in a black suit, a man who owned casinos and hotels and seemed to command every room merely by entering it.
The host laughed at the tale of his rejected first love, but I knew Adrian's expression better than she did.
That faint smile appeared when he was concealing something important.
When she asked what he would say if he met me again, he replied that he would say nothing.
This time, he said, he wasn't asking.
My manager, Tessa Grant, called before the applause finished.
Love Without Rules wanted me as a contestant on its new season, and producers were offering more money than I had made in the previous three years.
I was thirty-one, an actress with a nearly empty résumé, an overdue electricity bill, and a tiny apartment above a closed tailor shop.
I told Tessa no.
I had loved acting since childhood, but I would not become a publicity stunt designed around a powerful man's wounded pride.
I found my old phone in a desk drawer.
His final message still waited in the blocked thread: Emma, you're the one dream I don't want to wake up from.
Can I love you?
My teenage reply made me cringe: It's not even dark yet and you're already dreaming.
Wake up.
I remembered the school hallway, his trembling hands, and the way he had stared at the floor after reading my response.
I had thought refusing him sharply would protect us both from gossip about his dangerous family.
At seventeen, I had not known the difference between being careful and being cruel.
The doorbell sounded at 9:58 p.m.
Two shadows stretched across the hall beneath my door.
I had spent the entire evening performing little rituals of normal life.
I had put laundry in the washing machine, reheated leftover noodles, and highlighted an audition script that promised a speaking role if the producer liked my interpretation.
The only light over my desk came from a thrift-store lamp.
At some point I noticed snow gathering on the fire escape and remembered Adrian lending me his scarf after a rehearsal ten winters earlier.
I had returned it without meeting his eyes.
The memory troubled me not because I owed him affection, but because I wished I had known how to decline kindness without attacking the person offering it.
When the interview started, I nearly switched it off.
Instead, I watched because the city had trained everyone to watch the Morettis even when we pretended not to care.
I noticed the host's carefully rehearsed questions and the way the audience laughed too loudly after every pause.
Adrian rarely laughed with them.
He seemed to be watching something beyond the camera, as though waiting for an unseen signal.
After he named me, the ordinary objects in my apartment became suddenly precious.
The battered kettle was mine.
The faded photographs were mine.
Even the silence belonged to me, and I could not imagine surrendering it to strangers because of one broadcast.
I looked through the drawer containing old playbills and unpaid bills.
That collection told the story of a woman who had kept working despite countless disappointments.
The viewers calling me a mystery girl knew none of it.
They had been offered a plot, and they were already writing an ending for me.
I wanted to tell them that a woman did not become a prize simply because a powerful man remembered her.
At the same time, I could not stop thinking of Adrian's expression when he said he would not ask.
The boy in my memory had always waited for permission before borrowing a pencil.
That contrast frightened me more than his suit or his famous last name.
My telephone flashed with an unknown message telling me that I still blocked people too quickly.
A second message ordered me to open the door.
I felt the cold in my apartment despite the rattling radiator.
I crept to the peephole and saw two men in dark coats, one older with a broken-looking nose, the other carrying a slim leather folder.
Neither was Adrian.
I pressed my cheek against the door and demanded to know what they wanted.
The older man identified himself as Gabriel Rossi and said he worked in Adrian's security detail.
He asked me to step away from the windows immediately.
I almost laughed until something struck the glass above my kitchen sink.
The window spiderwebbed with a sharp crack.
Gabriel threw himself against the hallway side of the door and shouted for me to get low.
I dropped to the floor as a second impact punched a hole through a cupboard.
My television kept showing Adrian smiling beneath the studio lights.
An unseen voice outside shouted that the rear alley was compromised.
Gabriel said my name again, but this time it was not a command.
It was a warning.
Someone had known where I lived before I ever opened the door.
I slid the deadbolt aside while crouching behind the wall.
Gabriel entered first, holding up his empty hands so I could see them.
His younger colleague, Malik, moved toward the broken window and reported that a car was already speeding away.
Gabriel looked at the room, the cheap furniture, and my bare feet on the kitchen tile.
Then he spoke into his earpiece.
She's alive, Mr.
Moretti, but they got here before us.
May you like
My blood ran cold because I had mistaken Adrian's arrival for the danger.
The danger had arrived first.
