Prologue
PROLOGUE — Dahlia Montgomery
I tell myself I’m ready for this.
That’s the lie I cling to as I stand on the sidewalk, staring up at the skyscraper that houses my new employer’s studio. Fifty floors of glass, ambition, and people who don’t flinch at their own reflection. People who don’t have to rehearse breathing exercises before walking through a door.
The building gleams like it knows exactly who I used to be.
My therapist would call that projection. My NA sponsor would call this entire job a relapse waiting to happen.
They’re both probably right.
I haven’t worked in this world for years — the world of glitter‑slick stages, backstage chaos, and artists who burn too hot for their own good. I clawed my way out of it once. I promised myself I wouldn’t go back.
So why did the label choose me?
There are a hundred stylists in this city who live for this scene, who thrive in it, who don’t have to count their heartbeats in elevators. I’m not one of them anymore. I’m the girl who rebuilt her life from the inside out, who learned to sleep without chemical shortcuts, who learned to stay when everything in her wanted to run.
And yet… they called me.
A gust of wind pushes at my back, nudging me toward the revolving doors. I tighten my grip on my portfolio, pretending it’s confidence instead of survival instinct.
One step forward — and memory drags me two steps back.
Suddenly I’m fifteen again, standing in a high school hallway that smelled like floor wax and cheap perfume, watching a boy who shouldn’t have mattered… matter far too much.
We met in high school — me, the new girl and a sophomore; him, the transfer student with a reputation that arrived before he did. Rumor was he’d been kicked out of some military academy for fighting, or drinking, or existing too loudly. The polite term was super senior. The whispered one was lost cause.
Silas Masters was a holy vessel of chaos and sin. Not godly… but nefarious, with charred embers where other people kept their good intentions.
And I was that quiet, too‑smart‑for‑her‑own‑good foolish fat girl who would’ve done anything just to float in his orbit.
What’s that old saying? Opposites attract. Well… what if the opposite is said about us.
Because Silas and I weren’t opposites. We weren’t even equals. I was the secret he kept for over a decade — the addiction he was too ashamed to give up but never stopped using. The thing he blamed for every mistake he ever made, even when I wasn’t anywhere near him. The ghost he swore he’d exorcised, only to come crawling back to when the world got too loud.
And I let him. God help me, I let him.
The elevator dings behind me, snapping the memory in half. I blink up at the studio’s logo, my pulse thudding in my throat. I’m here for a job. A paycheck. A future I’m trying to believe I deserve.
But the past has teeth.
And as I step through the revolving doors, I can’t shake the feeling that whatever waits for me upstairs is going to pull Silas Masters — the boy I should’ve never loved — right back into my life.
