I built my first company with a laptop that didn't belong to me and a Wi-Fi password I stole from a coffee shop. No connections. No handouts. No safety net. Just a vision, desperation, and a lot of anger.
People look at me now and they see power. Elegance. Precision. The suits. The title. The way I walk into rooms and make decisions like I was born to do it. But the truth is—I didn't come from clean lines and boardrooms.
I came from nothing.
A one-bedroom apartment with mold in the ceiling. A father who drank more than he worked. A mother who left when I was thirteen and never came back. I learned early that people don't save you. You either survive or you don't.
I chose to survive.
I started designing logistics software for warehouses when I was barely out of high school. I sold my first prototype for $30,000—and I used every cent to disappear from the life I was born into. I moved across the city. Changed my number. Didn't look back.
Now I run three companies. One in tech. One in real estate. One in international freight. I have offices in three countries, over a hundred employees, and deals stacked into the next quarter. My days are precision-cut—breakfast meetings, power calls, silent cars, cold hotel rooms. I control everything. I have to.
Because if I don't control it, it controls me.
That's how I keep everything separate. That's how I keep my emotions locked away in places I don't open. That's how I kept women at arm's length—until her.
Lyra.
She doesn't know this version of me. The me before the suits. The me that slept on floors. The me that thought love was a weakness. She only sees the man who walks into her life and disrupts it.
But she doesn't know that she's been disrupting me since the day I first saw her.
She was seventeen. A wide-eyed dreamer with messy notebooks and too much curiosity. I told myself she was just a kid. My best friend's sister. Off-limits. Easy to ignore.
But she grew up. And she saw me.
And that terrified me more than anything else in my life.
Because the way she looks at me—like I'm not broken, like I'm not unreachable—it makes me want things I told myself I couldn't afford to want.
Love. Warmth. Something real.
And that's dangerous.
Because I don't know how to love someone without destroying parts of them in the process.