Chapter 2 The Boy Who Owns Everything

POV: Lila Monroe

I spent the whole rideshare ride telling myself I was overreacting.

It was a comment. A stupid, careless comment from a man who had too much wine and not enough self-awareness. I had been careful for two years and one loose-mouthed client on his fourth drink was not going to unravel that.

By the time I got back to my room I almost believed it.

I dropped the borrowed heels by the door and sat on the edge of my bed and pulled up my brother's latest hospital invoice on my phone because that was what I did when I needed to remember why any of this was worth the risk. The number had not changed. 

Eli's next treatment was in six weeks. I had three of the four instalments covered. The fourth was what tonight was supposed to fix.

I put the phone face down on the nightstand and got ready for bed and lay in the dark and listened to my roommate's breathing from across the room until it slowed and evened out.

I did not sleep.

At some point around two in the morning I stopped pretending I was going to and sat up and thought about the man with dark hair instead, which was not something I had planned to do.

He had not looked afraid of anything. That was the first thing I kept coming back to, not because it was unusual in a restaurant full of rich men, but because his kind of calm was different. He had sat across from the older man, who was clearly somebody important, and he had listened the way I listened to clients.

I had watched him watch me for nearly an hour.

That was the part I had not fully admitted to myself until now.

I did not know his name. What I knew was that he was connected to whoever that older man was, and someone like him didn’t end up in the same building as me by accident. 

I told myself that was a reason to be careful.

The next morning I was in the library by eight, already two coffees in, working through a paper on contract law that was due on Friday.

Someone sat down near me.

I looked up.

It was a girl from my economics seminar, Sofia, who smiled and pulled out her own notes and said nothing further, which was exactly the kind of social interaction I could handle before nine o'clock. I went back to my paper.

I was two paragraphs from finishing when my phone buzzed.

Unknown number.

I stared at it for a long moment. I did not answer unknown numbers as a rule. I let it go to voicemail.

There was no voicemail.

The phone buzzed again. Same number.

I watched it until it stopped.

Then a text arrived from the same number. Just one line.

"I was not following you last night. I want you to know that before anything else."

I put my phone face down on the table.

Sofia was highlighting something. 

I picked the phone back up.

The message was still there. I read it again, which did not change what it said but gave me something to do while my brain ran the problem. He had my number, which meant he had either found the forum or found someone who knew someone, and neither option was comfortable. But the message itself was strange. 

I turned my phone over again and stared at the ceiling for three seconds.

Then I typed back: "How did you get this number."

The response came in under a minute.

"Same way you found the forum. Very careful looking."

My stomach did something I was not going to name. I closed the message thread and finished my paper and did not look at my phone again for forty-seven minutes.

That evening, in the dining hall, someone dropped a tray near the entrance and the sound made me look up fast, scanning the room.

I found him immediately, without meaning to.

He was three tables away, sitting alone with a book open, not looking at me. 

My tray was getting cold.

I sat back down and stared at my food and understood, with the particular clarity that only arrived when I had been refusing to understand something for too long, that Ryder Kane already knew more about how I moved through this campus than I had let anyone know in two years.

That was not a small thing.

That was the entire problem.