Prologue

“I told you, I don’t ever want to see his face again. Not now, not ever.”

“But now what?”

“You’re telling me I don’t have a choice? That I have to go in there, slap on a fake smile, and act professional in front of the biggest asshole in the world?”

James Hale had learned, over the years, to read the difference between Mi Rae’s normal fury and the kind that meant something underneath it hadn’t healed right. This was the second kind. She’d been sharper than usual all morning, snapping at the barista, snapping at her own reflection in the car window, and he’d chalked it up to nerves about the investors. Now, watching her pace a groove into the parking lot asphalt, he wasn’t so sure. There was something in the set of her shoulders that had nothing to do with Vega Entertainment’s boardroom and everything to do with whatever she wasn’t saying.

He filed it away to ask about later. Right now, they had thirty minutes to get her calm enough to walk into a room without setting it on fire.

Stefan Blackwood heard her before he saw her, a voice with real heat behind it, cutting clean across the parking lot to the elevator where the rest of the band was already crowded in, waiting on him. Women yelling into their phones outside Vega Entertainment wasn’t exactly rare. This one, though. He leaned back against the panel just to keep listening, and didn’t examine too closely why.

“Well, maybe if you’d kept your temper in check,” James answered, calm, and a little too pleased with itself for someone talking her down.

“My temper? Oh, so we’re blaming me now? What about that old coot who couldn’t keep his eyes off my chest just because he’s an investor? You’re lucky I didn’t cut his balls off and use them for ice hockey practice.”

Damien made a sound like he’d swallowed his own tongue. Lucas didn’t even try to hide it, laughed outright, loud enough that a couple of interns glanced over. Stefan bit down on his own smile. Hockey pucks and castration. He hadn’t heard that combination before, and some small, unhelpful part of him wanted very badly to see the face that went with it.

“Mi Rae. These are two entirely different things,” James said, patient the way you get after years of practice. “Color Me Pink needs investors. You already burned the bridge with Cameron. This so-called asshole is your only option left.”

“Why do you even hate him this much? Didn’t you tell me he was hot back in college?”

“And haven’t we established,” she said, like she was reciting scripture, “that when I call a man hot, it only ever means one of two things. He’s an asshole. Or he’s gay. There’s no in-between.”

Stefan found himself nodding along before he caught it. Christ. He didn’t even disagree.

The elevator doors slid open, and the seven of them piled in, too many bodies for the space, the kind of quiet that settles right before something breaks. Seventeenth floor. Today they were finally doing it: walking into that meeting and killing their contract with Vega for good, whatever it cost them.

He’d just turned to hit the button when a white sneaker jammed itself between the closing doors.

His eyes followed it up. Ripped denim, a loose top slipping off one shoulder, collarbone catching the overhead light. And then her face — unimpressed, already annoyed, like he was something she’d stepped in on her way to somewhere better.

She was beautiful. It landed in his chest like something physical, low and unwelcome and entirely out of his control.

“Do you mind?” she said, and he realized, a beat too late, that he was blocking the door.

He stepped aside. She walked past him like he wasn’t even there — no double take, no recognition, nothing. Just one slow, deliberate once-over that told him exactly what she thought of what she saw, and left every nerve in his body a little too aware of exactly where her eyes had gone.

The nerve of her.

He caught himself watching the floor numbers climb after the doors shut behind her — an old habit he hadn’t used in years, tracking something the way you’d track prey, or a threat. Neither felt like the right word for what she was. He looked away from the numbers, annoyed at himself for looking at all.

“No, please — come in,” Adrian said, ever the diplomat, already smoothing over something that hadn’t even happened yet.

She didn’t so much as glance his way. She picked her conversation back up instead, with James trailing behind her — tall, visibly exhausted, clearly a professional at managing her by now. He felt it before he understood it: a drop in temperature at his back, faint and gone almost as soon as he noticed it, like someone had cracked a window in the dead of winter. He glanced over his shoulder at the elevator they’d just left. Nothing. He shook it off and kept walking.

“…just behave for thirty minutes. This contract actually matters. You’re the boss. Try thinking about the people who work for you, for once.”

“James Hale, I am the definition of manners. Don’t start with me.”

Somewhere behind him, Damien’s phone buzzed with a text — because apparently *she’s hot* required its own written record. Stefan rolled his eyes. Kai’s reply landed a second later, four words, entirely unnecessary. Even Kai. Adrian’s jaw had gone tight in the way it did when he was fighting his own instincts and losing.

The elevator dinged. Asher shoved past on his way out and knocked Stefan forward — straight into her, hands landing on her before his brain caught up to what his body had already decided to do.

“Whoa — what was that for?”

He froze. Oranges and vanilla. Warm skin under his palms where his hand had landed at her bare shoulder, his other hand curved instinctively at her waist like it belonged there, like it had done this before.

*Do you mind?* Her voice interrupted his musings, but he didn’t pay much attention.

He had no idea why suddenly these details mattered so much. Only that it did, immediately, completely, and somewhere low in his chest something that had been silent for nine hundred and forty-five years gave one hard, unmistakable thud.

“Do you mind?” she said again — and this time there was something else laced under the irritation. Amusement, maybe. The ghost of a smile she wasn’t quite letting herself have, like she’d felt exactly what he had and wasn’t ready to admit it either.

Ryan cleared his throat behind him, low and deliberate, and Stefan snapped back into his own body fast — mortified, achingly aware of exactly where his hands had ended up, and even more aware that he didn’t want to move them yet.

He let go like he’d touched something hot. Whatever apology he’d been building never made it out of his mouth before she was gone, striding off the elevator without so much as a glance back — hips, heels, the last trace of that scent trailing after her like a hook already set.

“Rude,” he muttered — and meant it, and didn’t believe it, both at once.

“Got lost there, Blackwood?” Ryan asked, too knowing.

“You might as well go after her, the way you were staring,” Damien added, and there was an edge under the teasing that hadn’t been there five minutes ago.

Stefan barely heard either of them. He turned to Adrian instead, voice low, not really meant for the room.

“I could smell her.”

The joking stopped cold.

Because they all could. Oranges and vanilla, unmistakable, cutting straight through nine hundred and forty-five years of nothing — through dead senses, through indifference, through every wall each of them had spent centuries building against exactly this. Kai’s fingers had curled into a fist at his side without his permission. Asher hadn’t opened his eyes once since the doors closed, jaw locked like a man holding a door shut against something that wanted in.

Lucas was the first to stop smiling. He’d been the loudest of them thirty seconds ago, and now he just looked at Stefan like he was doing math he didn’t like the answer to. Damien’s phone stayed in his pocket this time. Whatever this was, it had stopped being funny somewhere between the elevator doors closing and Stefan’s four flat words.

No one said anything for a long moment. There was nothing to say — not yet, not with the meeting still in front of them and a woman on the other side of those doors who had no idea what she’d just done to seven men who’d spent centuries forgetting how to feel anything at all. Ryan was the one who finally broke it, voice quieter than his usual needling.

“That’s not just attraction.”

“No,” Adrian said. “It isn’t.”

Stefan said nothing. He was still watching the space where she’d been standing, like the elevator itself might still be holding some trace of her if he looked hard enough.

And underneath all of it — for the first time in all these years —

Their hearts were beating.

Every single one of them.