Chapter 1: Lady Luck Has Taken My Side

Lyra's POV

I'm Lyra Valente, twenty-two, in my graduating year at St. Jude University with a double major in art history and finance. I think people are like trees. The higher they reach for the sunlight, the deeper their roots have to drive into the dark earth. Plenty of people praise my looks; plenty fall in love with my personality. I know every bit of it, and I want a good life, so I've used all of it—turned men's admiration into chips and moved among men from every kind of family background.

I studied finance without mercy, threw myself into social etiquette and the rules of the upper circles, coldly vetted every single person, cultivated my social persona, and built a network of connections that was mine.

To some people I dole out exactly the right amount of charm, in exchange for entrée to dinners and cocktail parties. With others I keep nothing but a light acquaintance, a fallback in reserve.

I keep the categories clean: affection and flirtation are all tools for climbing. You don't get to choose your father, but you do choose your husband. Marriage is a woman's second birth, and I intend to climb using every chip I have.

An April evening, only a sliver of daylight left. I was walking back toward the St. Jude gates from off campus when I spotted a chair on the sidewalk. Sit down, fix my face, then walk in.

Wherever I am, whenever it is, I don't dare let my appearance slip for half a second.

Who knows which corner you'll turn and run into the man destined for you.

A brightly colored car sat at an angle by the curb. A guy came around the front of it and blocked my way, smiling as if it came naturally: "Hey—what department are you in? Can I get your Instagram?"

I raised my head slowly. My smile held a practiced arc, rehearsed a thousand times over, shy at exactly the right dose. Cold pale skin, pale gray-green eyes, long hair so dark a brown it read as black. What he saw was a face; what I saw was a full set of price tags. A Ralph Lauren polo, Lacoste chinos, and a pair of instantly recognizable Common Projects white sneakers. Five to seven thousand all told—flawless, and dull. My refusal was already queued up on the tip of my tongue. My standard had never been whether a man was handsome. Only whether he was worth writing into the list.

My gaze slid lower and landed on the wrist he had draped over the car roof.

It wasn't gold, and it wasn't the kind of watch you can clock from thirty feet away. It was a Lange. Most people his age had never even heard the name, but anyone who truly knew watches knew what it stood for: the summit of German watchmaking, two hundred thousand at list price. When a guy has that hanging on his wrist, it stops being his clothes that do the talking. It's his family talking.

Over these years of studying, between that and the influence of my rich-kid roommate, I had these luxury brands at my fingertips.

My lashes flickered, and I held out my phone. "Sure."

A good hunter has to know which prey is worth aiming at, after all.

I took the phone back as if nothing had happened, said goodbye to him, told him I had someone to meet. Then I covered the last few steps to the chair, sat down, and pulled up my camera roll feed of the day he'd just walked into.

The roster kept growing. I shook my head.

Not enough. Nowhere near enough.

I got up and finished the walk to the gates.

Dunbar, an Oxford anthropologist, proposed the Rule of 150—that the ceiling on human cognition is somewhere around 148 to 150 social relationships maintained at once. I couldn't agree more. Climbing a tier or two, any clear-headed girl can manage. The wall you truly can't get past doesn't answer to effort, it answers to luck. And luck isn't begged for, it's netted. You have to cast wide enough before you pull anything up.

But I wasn't discouraged, because even Lady Luck was on my side.

Two weeks ago, some bastard on a bicycle knocked me down on the sidewalk, and I was out cold for half an hour. I woke up in the hospital: a nurse took my wrist to check my pulse, and at that very moment images I'd never seen before started surfacing in my head, broken and fragmentary. At the time I thought I'd scrambled my brain.

But the doctors found nothing wrong, it didn't come back afterward, and I stopped paying it any mind—until I met Philip Hale. We touched, and the fragments came back. That was when I understood what the switch was: bare skin against bare skin, nothing in between. His hand on mine, and I had what he wanted most, and what had hurt him. Nobody walks up and puts a bare hand on you, so from then on I did the touching myself. With that, I'd be unstoppable.

Philip Hale was the cousin of Damian Quinn, the man who spoke for the Hale branch of the bloodline. Both of them were already subjects of my observation; I just hadn't found the moment to make a move when the opportunity arrived on its own. That accident—how is it not a blessing in disguise?

So I started touching people on purpose. Fingertips grazing a palm when I handed something over, a hand pressed to a forearm when I thanked someone, a handshake held half a second too long. Every time, something came back. I don't know where the ability came from and I don't intend to dig into it. Whether a thing is worth anything is just a question of what it can be traded for.

That wasn't sentiment. It was a verdict. Everything I already had—this face, this head, that plan—had just gained one more weapon that no one could see.

But one hand can't hold up a plan. I needed names, I needed numbers, I needed enough hands to touch.

Back in my room, I opened the memo I had never shown anyone. I added Brandon to it—Brandon Whitaker, industrial coatings family, new money, donated a boat to the rowing team. Money and nothing else, nothing that sticks. Observe.

I fixed my bangs, found the angle, took four selfies, and snapped a few shots of campus at night while I was at it. An open book under a desk lamp, a dog tied up outside a coffee shop. The edits were clean; you couldn't tell they'd been edited. Posting every few days is routine maintenance on a persona, and of course it's fishing too.

The post went out, and likes and DMs poured in together. People asking whether I'd eaten, people telling me I was pretty, and two strangers sending me money outright through Venmo, saying they only wanted a couple of words with me. I took not one cent. Most of them were suitors from campus; take the money and refuse the dating, and inside a week the story would have traveled through the entire dormitory building. I skimmed past the ones who'd overplayed it, and quietly flagged the few who gave before I ever had to ask. I didn't delete a single message. The number was exactly what I was after.

My background was already ordinary enough. My record had to survive a rich family's background check.

I've had enough. Not enough to eat, wearing clothes other people didn't want anymore, reading faces to get through the day—I don't want one more day of that life. From now on: cast wide, take in plenty.

Scrolling to the very top of the memo, there was the name I'd been watching for nearly a year: Damian Quinn, twenty-four. A master's student at St. Jude Business School, a youth observer on the Quinn Group board, a trustee of the Quinn Foundation. Arrogant, solitary, a control freak, heir to the Quinn Group, and with no elder in the family besides his mother.

I set the phone face down on the desk and got up to wash.