chapter 11
That night, I dreamed of the basement again.
Only this time the memory changed.
I was on the floor, wrists raw, cheek against concrete. Ethan crouched in front of me, his face half-shadowed.
“This is what I owed Rose,” he had said.
But in the dream, I heard the line that came before it.
The line I had forgotten because pain had swallowed everything else.
He had been drunk. Furious. Shaking.
“She lied to me.”
I woke up with my heart pounding so hard it hurt.
By morning, I had a name in my head.
Gideon Vale.
In this life, he was nothing to me yet. A man I had met once at a charity gala years ago. Old money, colder reputation, brilliant at turning dying companies into kingdoms. In my previous life, Ethan hated him with a focus so vicious it had always felt personal. I had assumed it was competition.
Now I wasn’t so sure.
I called his office before I could talk myself out of it.
When I arrived at Vale Holdings that afternoon, the receptionist treated me with the sort of careful warmth reserved for the rich, the desperate, and the potentially troublesome. Ten minutes later, I was being led into a glass-walled office high above the city.
Gideon Vale was at the window with his back to me.
He turned when he heard the door.