Elena Pov
Seven Years Ago
I was nineteen years old and I did not want to be at that party. My mother had spent forty minutes convincing me, not with logic but with the specific guilt she deploys like a weapon. . The dress she lent me was too tight across the shoulders. The heels were an inch taller than anything I had ever worn. I spent the cab ride practicing how to walk in them without looking like I was practicing.
The party was in a penthouse on the north side of Voss City. The kind of building with a lobby that makes you feel poor just by standing in it. My mother moved through it like she belonged there. She has always been good at that. I followed her and kept my face neutral and told myself I would stay two hours and then I was going home.
The penthouse was full of people I did not know and did not want to know. Men in expensive suits. Women with the polish of people who have never worried about money. I took a champagne and did not drink because I wanted to keep my head clear. I found a spot near the window and stayed there.
Voss City was below me. The same skyline I would one day watch from a bridge with him, though I did not know that yet. I was nineteen and standing in a room full of danger I had no vocabulary for, thinking about nothing more complicated than how soon I could take these shoes off.
That was when I felt it. The particular sensation of being watched by someone who is not trying to hide it. I turned.
He was across the room. Standing with two other men, a glass in his hand, not drinking from it. He was younger than most of the people there, mid-twenties at most, but he did not have the look of someone who felt out of place. He had the look of someone who was evaluating the place to determine whether it was worth his time.
And he was looking directly at me. Not the way men at parties usually look. Not sweeping or assessing. He was looking at my face. At my eyes, which were looking back at him, which I realized a half second too late. I looked away.
He had not moved. Had not looked away. There was something almost rude about it, the steadiness of it, but it did not feel rude. It felt like being seen by someone who was genuinely trying to, which is a different thing entirely and which I did not have a name for at nineteen but recognized in my chest immediately.
My mother appeared at my elbow.
"Don't," she said quietly.
I did not look at her. "Don't what."
"That's Damien Cole."
The name meant nothing to me then. I would learn later what it meant to everyone else in that room. What it meant to the city. What it had cost him to build and what it would cost the people around him to stay. But that night I was nineteen and the name meant nothing and the man across the room was still looking at me like I was the only interesting thing he had encountered all evening.
"So?" I said.
My mother made a sound I had never heard her make before. Something between a warning and a prayer. Then someone called her name from across the room and she went, and I was alone by the window again, and when I looked back he was walking toward me. Up close he was taller than I had registered. Dark suit, no tie, top button open. Near-black hair. A jaw that could have been drawn with a ruler. Steel-grey eyes that did not waver when he stopped in front of me. Most men smile. An opener. A softening. Something to make the approach feel less like what it is.
He did not smile. He just looked at me and said: "You've been standing at this window for forty minutes."
"Have you been counting?" I replied
"Yes."
I blinked. I had expected a denial. A deflection. Some version of I just happened to notice. Not a flat, unapologetic yes delivered like a statement of fact.
"That's a little strange," I said.
"Probably," he agreed. "Why haven't you moved?"
"I like the view."
He turned and looked at the city below for a moment. Then back at me. "Most people at these things don't look at the view," he said. "They look at each other."
"Most people at these things are looking for something," I said. "I'm not."
Something shifted in his face. Not a smile. Something quieter than a smile, and more interested.
"What's your name," he said.
"Elena."
"Elena." He said it once, like he was testing the weight of it. "I'm Damien."
"I know," I said. "My mother told me not to talk to you."
A beat of silence.
"And yet," he said.
"And yet," I agreed.
We talked for two hours. Not the way people talk at parties, all surface and performance. We talked the way people do when they forget to be careful, which I cannot explain, because I was always careful. Something about him made me set that down. He asked questions and listened to the answers. He disagreed with me twice without softening it, and I argued back, and he listened to that too. No one had ever argued with me like I was worth arguing with.
At some point my mother found me, took one look at the two of us, and manufactured a reason for us to leave within the next fifteen minutes. In the cab home she was quiet in a way that was louder than anything she could have said. I looked out the window at Voss City moving past and felt something I did not have a name for yet.
Three days later he found my number. I still do not know how. I should have been more alarmed by that than I was.
I think about that night now, and I understand something I have spent five years refusing to understand. I did not fall for him despite knowing what he was. I fell for him because of the way he looked at me. Like I was the only interesting thing in a room full of powerful people. Like I was worth forty minutes of watching and worth arguing with and worth finding three days later through means I never questioned closely enough. No one had ever made me feel like that before.
And now he is in my mother's sitting room with his hands in his pockets and his face giving away nothing, and I am not nineteen again in all the ways that matter. Which is the most dangerous thing that has happened to me since I stepped off that plane.