Room 209 of Meridian Hall had a whiteboard on the door that served as a warning. It read:IF YOU ARE HERE TO BORROW SOMETHING, THE ANSWER IS NO.IF YOU ARE HERE TO PITCH ME A STORY IDEA, SUBMIT IT THROUGH THE PAPER.IF YOU ARE HERE FOR ANY OTHER REASON, RECONSIDER.Callan stared at the block letters for a moment and ignored it before knocking. There was no response for a good half a minute, so he knocked again, harder this time."I can hear you breathing," a voice snapped from inside. "The whiteboard was pretty clear.""My name is Callan Voss. I need two minutes. Then you never have to see me again."The door opened slowly, revealing herself with an air of deliberate suspense. Seren Ashby was absolutely not what he expected. She stood there in pajama bottoms and an oversized shirt, her dark hair knotted atop her head, reading glasses perched on her forehead. She held a red pen like a weapon. She looked like someone who had been working for six hours and had no intention of stopping.S

Seren didn’t sleep that night. She lay on her back, staring into the dark of room 209 while the full account of her night spiraled in her mind. She had climbed into a car with a stranger, walked into a viper’s nest of a dinner, and looked Maris Voss in the eye. She had been exactly herself, which was the single most reckless thing she could have done. Being herselfw as the very thing she had come to this university to bury.Seren Ashby was a necessary mask. Her true name was Seren Crestwood-Dane, and her stepfather—the man who had legally appended his name to hers when she was eleven and spent the years since dismantling every good thing her mother had built—was currently engaged in a financial restructuring that would leave him very interested in finding her.Seren possessed a document. It was a single page, signed by her mother before she died, that pre-empted the inheritance changes he had made and restored the Crestwood-Dane assets to her. He had buried it, but she had found a c

Dorian Chase’s office occupied the thirty-second floor of the Chase Tower, the sharpest needle on the Meridian City skyline. He had designed the space with the intent of watching the Voss tower and reminding himself constantly of what his target was. He was actually obsessed; the Voss tower was literally just 4 blocks away.He was twenty-two, and he had been staging this collapse for four years.His father, Edmund, had lost a vital port contract to Maris Voss when Dorian was eighteen. The loss had cost Chase Holdings two hundred million in projected revenue, but the real damage was actually the humiliation.Edmund had come home that night, eaten his dinner in silence, and gone to bed as if nothing had happened. Dorian had watched his father absorb the defeat with what people called dignity, and he had decided then that it was the most pathetic thing he had ever witnessed.And since then, he had been building his counter-stroke.His assistant stepped into the room, holding a tablet c

The intelligence team was actually three people, not six. His grandmother had led him to believe in a small army, but the reality was actually more dangerous. The core of the operation consisted of Anna, a former city prosecutor, Rue, a tech prodigy whose fingers seemed to dance across keys at the speed of thought; and Winthrop, an older man with silver hair and a lifetime of secrets from the national financial crimes unit.They met in the basement of the estate at 10:00 p.m. The room was small and quiet, but it seemed big until the new boss walked in. Callan stepped into the light, his hand resting briefly on Seren’s back. It was a gesture of ownership, or perhaps protection, that neither of them acknowledged."This is Seren," Callan said, his voice echoing off the concrete walls. "She is my partner in this. Give her the same clearance you give me."Anna looked at Seren, scanning the way Seren held herself—shoulders squared, jaw set, eyes tracking every piece of equipment in the roo

The night Callan Voss walked into Chase Tower with Seren Ashby, he wasn't just a boy playing at rebellion anymore. He was a man wearing a dark jacket, a custom-forged contractor’s badge that Rue had looped into the building’s own security matrix, and the calmness of someone who had already accepted the possibility of being locked up in a prison cell.Seren was at his side, clothed in the same dark emerald dress she’d worn to the gala. To the lobby cameras, she was just an elegant, anonymous guest. In her own mind, she was more of a ghost. She kept her chin high and her breathing shallow, her eyes tracking the movement of the security detail like a hawk.This was her life now. A series of high-stakes tightrope walks, each one steeper than the last. She remembered the rush of the first time she’d forged her mother’s signature to secure her own tuition, the way the world felt like it was shifting beneath her feet.But this was quite different and the adrenaline rush that came with it was