Chương 1 - THE MAN I WAS RAISED TO FEAR
I walked into the beach house wearing nothing but a towel.
I thought it was empty.
Behind me, through glass doors and clipped hedges, my engagement party was still going — champagne, string lights, my father’s laugh making its rounds like currency. In front of me, in the hallway of beach house number seven, stood a man dripping seawater onto the hardwood, staring at me like he’d just watched a ghost grow a pulse.
Damien Moretti.
The name my father had spent fifteen years teaching me to fear.
“This house is occupied,” he said.
I didn’t move. Couldn’t.
“By who?”
“Me.” His eyes didn’t leave my face. “For the month.”
My pulse climbed into my throat. “You’re—”
“Damien Moretti.” He said it like a dare, watching for what my face would do.
It went white. That was what it did.
He knew my name too. Not from a headline. Not from a business card. And somehow, standing in a towel, cornered by the man my whole family called a monster, I wasn’t half as afraid of him as I was of what he might say next.
Three hours earlier, I’d been standing under string lights that cost more than most people’s cars, smiling for a photographer I hadn’t invited, beside a man I’d never chosen.
“Say something,” Ethan murmured near my ear, his hand settling at the small of my back like he owned the real estate. “You look like you’re at a funeral.”
“I’m smiling.”
“Smile harder.”
My father tapped his glass with a fork, and the room quieted the way rooms always quieted for Richard Bennett.
“To family,” he said, raising his glass. “To trust. To the beginning of something historic.”
Historic. Not happy. Not chosen.
Across the room, Priya caught my eye and mouthed, are you okay? I gave her the smallest shake of my head I could manage without anyone else catching it.
Ethan’s mother was already discussing venue dates with a planner three feet away, like I wasn’t standing right there holding a ring hand that didn’t feel like mine.
Near the bar, two of my father’s security men had their heads bent together, voices dropped low.
“Moretti’s back at the cove house,” one said.
“Boss know?”
“Boss knows everything. That’s the problem.”
The name landed like a struck match. I’d grown up hearing it the way other kids heard bogeyman. Stay away from the Moretti properties. Don’t say that name at this table. They ruined the Callahans. They’ll ruin us if we let them.
My father had built an entire religion out of that name being evil. I had never once asked him why.
By the time the band slowed for photographs, I’d had enough. I slipped past the hedge line toward the private beach houses, most of them closed for the season, and let myself into number seven with a door code I’d known since I was twelve. Mid-renovation, don’t book it, nobody’s there, my father had said at the last property meeting.
I peeled off my dress and stood under hot water until my hands stopped shaking. For four minutes, I wasn’t anyone’s daughter. I wasn’t anyone’s fiancée. I was just a woman breathing.
Then I heard the front door.
I wrapped a towel around myself and stepped into the hallway to see who else had wandered into what I thought was my hiding place.
He was already there. Soaked from the ocean. A t-shirt hanging off one shoulder. Looking at me like he’d walked into someone else’s dream by mistake.
He tossed a folded shirt across the hallway without asking permission.
“Put that on,” he said. “Before your dress and your dignity both end up as evidence in someone else’s story.”
“Whose story?”
“Yours. If your father’s people find you half-dressed in a Moretti beach house, he won’t ask what happened. He’ll decide what happened.”
I pulled the shirt on with shaking hands, back turned, listening to him not watch me.
“Why do you care what it looks like?” I asked.
“Because he’d use it,” Damien said. “Against both of us. That’s what he does. He uses things.”
“You don’t know my father.”
“I know him better than you think.”
He opened a drawer and set an old photograph on the counter — didn’t hand it to me, just set it down like a card in a game only he understood the rules of. A woman in scrubs, laughing, one arm looped around a man who looked like a harder, older version of him.
I stepped closer. Something in the set of her jaw stopped my breath.
“That’s—” My voice cracked. “That’s not possible.”
“Your mother,” Damien said.
May you like
He didn’t finish the sentence.
He didn’t need to. Whatever he was about to say was going to rewrite everything I’d ever believed about my own family — and I couldn’t decide if I wanted to hear it, or run.
