Chapter 1 Chapter 1

POV: Sloane

Fifty thousand dollars buys a lot of audacity.

Enough to crash a billionaire's grand opening in a blazer that smelled like bleached espresso rags.

I stood in the crowd with the two most important things in my life in my pocket: a cashier's check that cost me 365 days of my life, and a letter from the man currently on stage, who once wrote to me that kindness was the greatest investment.

And in about five minutes, I was going to find out that only one of those things was real.

My feet throbbed. A ten-hour shift behind a café counter does that. Follow it up with a 3am deadline for the writing gig that funded the check in my pocket, and I was running on reserve energy.

But to hell with the grand opening. I was here to buy my life back. Hand him this piece of paper and finally look him in the eye without feeling like I had a price tag hanging over my head.

God, I hated owing people. The vulnerability of it made my skin crawl.

Growing up, my life was scored by shattered plates and screaming matches. I spent high school hiding cash in my shoes so my parents wouldn't drink my paycheck away.

A childhood like that beats the fairytale right out of you. You learn real quick that nobody is coming to the rescue.

Until Julian Blackwood did.

I was just one out of ten thousand desperate students who submitted an essay to his foundation.

He pulled mine out of the pile.

His foundation covered my college tuition, every single cent, right up until I crossed the graduation stage last year. But the money wasn't even the thing that saved me. It was the letters. Typed on heavy cream paper, telling me my mind was an asset. Telling me my future mattered. That I mattered. They were words I'd never heard from any other soul.

And so I spent four good years of my life worshipping a man I'd never met simply because he was the only person who had ever been kind to me.

Now he was up there, a few feet away from me, and it didn't still feel real.

Julian Blackwood in the flesh.

I squeezed the check in my pocket so hard my fingers ached.

He looked exactly the way I'd always pictured the man writing those letters, only taller than I expected. A lot taller. He wore a dark suit, and the way he took up space made the stage beneath him look like a cheap prop. Beside him, the mayor looked like a nervous extra, sweating through his collar just to share the spotlight.

The oversized scissors snapped shut and the paparazzi went wild.

Only for Julian to walk away, leaving the mayor's handshake hanging in the air and vanishing into the VIP backstage.

A security guard turned to shove a photographer back.

That was my window.

I slipped past the velvet barricade and pulled the glass door shut behind me.

Julian didn't hear me come in.

He stood ten feet away, cloaked in the shadows and his back was to me. But something felt off. Something was.

All that effortless, billionaire calm I had seen outside was gone.

He was tearing at his collar and yanking at his tie like it was strangling him. The action felt alien, I almost didn't register it. Because it didn't fit the man from the letters. It didn't fit the man from the stage, either.

"Mr. Blackwood."

My voice came out way softer than I wanted it to.

His hands stopped moving.

He turned around slowly and my stomach did this weird flutter.

"Security is getting lazy," he muttered. "How much did you pay the guy at the rope?"

"Nothing. I just—" I swallowed hard, forcing myself to step forward. My hands were shaking, so I pulled the cashier's check from my pocket and smoothed it out. "I just needed five minutes. I'm Sloane."

He stared at me. Blankly. Not one flicker of recognition crossed his face.

"Congratulations." His voice came out flat. "The exit is behind you."

The flutter in my stomach didn't stop, but I pushed on. I had rehearsed this in my bedroom a hundred times, but the words I had crammed were lost before they could even go past my lips. I struggled to find words, "The essay contest. Four years ago. You covered my tuition." I held out the check. "I came to pay you back."

He looked at the piece of paper in my hand, then back up to my face. His eyes were ice.

"Let me guess. You came all this way to hand me a check, hoping I'd be so charmed by your gritty integrity that I'd offer you a job. Or a dinner."

I blinked. "What? No. I brought this because I owe you."

"You and half this city." He let out a harsh breath, running a hand through his hair. "Look. I don't know which of my PR team's charity stunts you crawled out of, but I'm out of patience today."

Charity stunt. The words hit me like a bucket of ice water.

I stepped closer, desperate to make him remember. "Mr. Blackwood, it wasn't a stunt. You wrote to me. For four years. You told me potential was worth more than a bank balance. You—"

His sound of his laugh cut me off.

"You actually think I sit at a desk writing pen-pal letters to every sob story the foundation sponsors?"

A physical blow would have hurt less.

I just stood there. Staring at him.

He looked down at me, his lip curling in disgust. "I don't have the time to memorize the faces of people who want my money, and I definitely don't have the inclination to hand out pocket change to every stray who sneaks backstage." He gestured toward the door. "Keep the money. Buy yourself a nicer blazer. And get out."

Stray. Pocket change.

The word sat there in the cold air.

I stood still before looking down at the fifty-thousand-dollar check in my hand.

I had worked graveyard shifts for months. I had skipped meals, lost sleep, and worn out my shoes just so I could hand this to him and finally be free.

And he just called me a stray.

For about two seconds, I felt like the stupidest girl in the world.

Then, all the awe, all the nerves, and all my pathetic gratitude evaporated, and my blood ran cold.

I didn't try to explain myself. You don't explain yourself to people who look at you like dirt.

The check slipped from my hand and fluttered through the space between us, missing his suit, and landed face-up on the floor.

"Keep the change, Mr. Blackwood."

I was almost at the door when I looked back. He was still staring at the check on the floor, like it had teeth.

When you grow up in a house full of liars, you learn to spot when a person's reaction doesn't match their words. A man who truly didn't care wouldn't look at a piece of paper with that kind of rigid intensity.

The math wasn't mathing.

​Whatever he was hiding behind that tie, it wasn't charity fatigue.

​And suddenly, walking away wasn't enough. I wanted to know exactly what it was.