Page 1

Chapter 1

Fantasia

“ F light attendants, please prepare for arrival.”

The captain’s voice crackles over the intercom, but I barely register the words. My fingers tighten around the armrest as the plane tilts forward, descending through the thick clouds, until the wheels finally touch the tarmac.

My plane is landing in a new country, but it doesn’t feel like a new beginning. It feels like the end.

The passengers around me are fidgeting in their seats, zipping up their carry-ons, and eagerly waiting to reunite with whoever or whatever awaits them. But for me, there's no one left to rush back to. Everything and everyone I know are in England, a country I've been exiled from. My brother, Achilles, with his shiny new family. My home, Wesley Hall, haunted as it might be by the ghosts of my father and all the men who told me I would never be enough.

But Wesley Hall isn't mine anymore. Now it belongs to Piers, my brother's best friend. My best friend too… once… but it feels like another lifetime.

The plane grinds to a halt. The bell dings, the seatbelt light blinks off, and the cabin erupts into the usual rustle of unbuckling. I stand, rolling my stiff shoulders, as the man behind me exhales loudly.

“Ah, that’s nice! Here’s to the start of a new journey, huh?” His British voice is directed- not at me, but at the passenger beside him. He’d been chatty at takeoff, but now, for the first time, something in his tone prickles at me. I glance back.

He’s still seated, head bowed under a New York Yankees cap, the brim tilted just low enough to hide his eyes. A flicker of recognition-

The carry-on smashes into my ribs. Air leaves my lungs in a whoosh as I stagger backward. Before I can right myself, my bodyguard’s hand clamps around my arm, wrenching me into the aisle. The cap, the voice, the nagging sense of knowing - gone before I can stitch them together.

No matter. Another English accent in a sea of Americans held some novelty- just not enough to endure ten hours of forced conversation. Fleeting is generous. Forgotten is better.

My bodyguards- my nannies- Matthew Barnes and Damien Armstrong, flank me as we step off the plane. I can almost appreciate their presence now. I've never been on a commercial flight before, only private ones when I was younger. Barnes, a towering figure, blocks my view, but I don't mind. There's nothing to see anyway in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The Raleigh-Durham airport is bustling, but with my bodyguards leading the way, we cut through the crowd swiftly. None of us have luggage to claim, since we brought only carry-on bags. My departure from London was a hurried one, a necessity to escape my enemies. We have only the essentials with us; the rest will come later.

My eyes wander over the crowd of travelers- tired families with small children, businessmen in rumpled suits, and people of all varieties holding up hand-drawn signs, trying to find the person they’re here to meet. And then, a flash of red hair catches my eye. I blink, and there he is: Piers Warwick.

My heart stops. He looks exactly the same as he did a year ago, and somehow completely different. His usually smooth-shaven square jaw is dark with rust-colored stubble, his hair a little longer than before, curling around his ears and forehead.

His dark green eyes meet mine briefly before sliding away, fixing on something behind me. They widen, his whole face twisting with sudden recognition. I whip around, slamming into Armstrong and treading on his feet, desperate to see who’s standing behind me. Who is Piers looking at if it isn’t me ?!

A man in sunglasses just behind Barnes lowers his head, the bill of his baseball cap throwing his face into shadow. There’s no one I know in the crowd behind him. And when I turn back, Piers is gone.

I blink rapidly, trying to clear my vision but he doesn't reappear. What would Piers be doing here in the States when he has an empire to rebuild in London?

The truth is, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen Piers only to realize he was a figment of my imagination. For a miserable eternity in my old room in Wesley Hall, what I was informed later was only a week-long trial, I sweated out the alcohol I’d used to keep my thoughts blurry and my nightmares at bay. Every time I opened my crusty eyes, Piers would be sitting at my bedside. But every time I reached out to touch him, slap him, or grab him and never let go, he wasn’t there.

A hand touches my shoulder and I nearly leap out of my skin. Armstrong moves in front of me, looking impatient.

“Try not to stop, ma’am, or we’ll lose you in the crowd,” he says, his black eyes hard.

That doesn’t sound half bad, but I don’t care enough to argue. My thoughts are still reeling from the sight of Piers. How long will these withdrawal hallucinations last?

More importantly, how much longer will Piers Warwick haunt me?

Maybe I deserve to be haunted after ordering my brother to kill him and driving two families nearly to bankruptcy trying to hunt him down after he failed to die.

Armstrong is in front of me now, perhaps not wanting to chance being stepped on again. Once we exit the terminal, I take a moment to suck in a full breath and try to recenter myself before following behind them. The crush of bodies eases, finally, but if I’m not careful I really will be lost here.

I take two steps before noticing something strange. Not the red hair of a man who shouldn’t be here but the purposeful, almost aggressive strut of two men moving through the crowd.

Toward me.

They’re dressed similarly, both in black blazers and slacks, with white and gold handkerchiefs tucked into their breast pockets. That’s all I see before Armstrong and Barnes step in front of me, blocking the men’s path and my view.

“Hey-” one of the men begins.

“Back off, pal.” Barnes’s baritone booms over the crowd.

“Who the fuck are-” the man snaps, but Barnes cuts him off.

“I said back off.”

“Get out of my way-”

Skin meets skin in a blow I don’t see. Armstrong opens his jacket, revealing something within.

“Woah, hey-!” one of the men exclaims.

A gunshot explodes over the din of the airport. The crowd seizes around me, like the inhale of some enormous, startled beast, before all hell breaks loose.

I’m shoved by a man at my elbow who turns right into me, panic making his eyes bulge. I try to turn with him, but a woman backs into me, crushing my toes under her heel. I jerk, falling, only to be held up by another person’s body.

These people are going to crush me. They’re going to knock me down and run over my body, trampling me until I’m nothing but pulp. Panic surges, but something in the back of my mind tells me to move- to fight for space, to stay on my feet . I haven’t even seen this new land, and I’m already being taken back out of it.

And yet, there’s… some strange relief in that.

A hand grabs my wrist and tugs, jarring me out of my numb thoughts.

“This way!”

The familiar English accent sounds above the chaos, and I’m jerked through the crowd before I can even protest. I trip, but his hand tightens until it hurts, forcing me to stay on my feet and keep moving. My ears are ringing from the screams, more gunshots crack through the airport, my body is buffeted by other bodies- but the man who’s grabbed me doesn’t let me go. He has a duffle bag that he uses as a shield and plow, forcing a way through the stampede for both of us. His head is covered by a ball cap, showing me only the nape of his red hair.

In a shade I know all too well.

We make it to an exit door, but the press of people also trying to leave almost tears us apart. The bones of my wrist grind together as my rescuer clings to me, but it’s worth it. We scrape our way through the crush of bodies without losing each other, and burst out into the bright March morning. The people we just fled the building with are either still running toward the parking lot or condensing into a growing crowd of frightened onlookers. I try to suck in my first full breath in a minute- and almost lose it and my carry-on as Mr. English Accent pulls me into another run across the blinding pavement.

“Where-”

“The bus. We’re getting the fuck away from here.”

I spare only a moment’s thought for my bodyguards, who may or may not still be in a gunfight with two strangers in the middle of an airport. I have no obligation to them, not really. We met for the first time yesterday when they were assigned to me by Achilles, and it was clear from the first moment that there would be no friendship between us. They are loyal dogs of the Ashwood family, one of the two mafia entities in London that I nearly ruined, and I was their ward not by choice, but by necessity. During the entire ten hour flight from England to North Carolina, we exchanged only a handful of sentences, none of them pleasant. And now, separated in a chaos they helped create, it’s entirely possible I’ll never see them again.

Hardly a loss.

But now I have a new problem. I’m alone in Raleigh, North Carolina with no chaperone and no idea where the home Achilles arranged for me is. And this red-haired Englishman has decided we’re in this together.

“Who the hell are you?” I pant as we take the stairs down to the ground level of the parking garage at a breakneck pace.

“You don’t know?”

I’m beginning to think that I do.

Or at least, I’m beginning to think these hallucinations are becoming even more terrifyingly lifelike.

We hit the ground floor and turn right, toward a long stretch of sidewalk scattered with only a few benches. Buses come and go, filling up with still confused and frightened travelers. My rescuer pulls me into one just as it hits capacity. The doors close, the bus jerks into motion, and I finally manage to take a full breath.

My relief is short-lived.

“Goddamn,” Mr. English Accent sighs from beside me. “What even happened back there?”

His face is still turned away from mine, but now that I’m not running for my life, I can’t deny the shade of his hair or the smattering of freckles across the back of his neck- a constellation I’ve seen a thousand times, and even more in my dreams and nightmares.

I reach up and yank the cap off his head, startling a few nearby bus passengers and my rescuer. He whips around, and I snatch his sunglasses too, revealing his face for the first time. What I’d seen through the crowd before, without a cap or glasses and with a face dark with stubble- had been an illusion for sure. But the man who stands before me now is painfully, undeniably real.

Piers Warwick blinks down at me with dark green eyes. There are rings beneath them that weren’t there a year ago. When his lips quirk, they don’t form his easy, crooked smile, but something sharp and guarded. Is that because of me?

I curse myself for the foolish question. What did I expect to happen when I forced him to go on the run?

Well, I expected him to die, and to conveniently stop being a problem.

I wonder if Piers can read my thoughts, because his eyes narrow just slightly, his smile becoming more sardonic. He puts his hand over mine on his baseball cap, his fingers strong and square, setting mine alive with sparks.

“Hey there, love.”