Lucas's POV
The city stretched before me like a kingdom I had clawed my way into. Floor-to-ceiling glass framed the skyline of Manhattan, steel and glass glittering in the golden morning haze. I stood there, silent, unmoving, watching the world I'd fought for. The office behind me hummed softly—too clean, too quiet. Nothing like the chaos I came from.
No one here knew what it cost me to reach this point. Not the board members. Not the staff. No one.
They didn't see the blood on my knuckles from underground fights, or the way my ribs ached for weeks after each win. They didn't know how I slept in library corners during the day after working nights in clubs, my backpack doubling as a pillow. They didn't know that safety, to me, was just a story other people told.
My past wasn't a chapter I turned—it was a wildfire I barely outran. The scars I carried weren't all skin-deep; some were rooted in silence, in cold nights and colder memories. I wore my success like armor, forged from every time the world tried to bury me and failed.
Until now.
A soft knock echoed from behind. My spine stiffened. I turned slowly.
And there she was.
Ava.
Standing like a ghost ripped from my past—flesh and bone and still somehow unreal. Time hadn't changed her much. The same hazel eyes. The same tilt to her lips. But the innocence was gone. Replaced by something harder. Wiser. Maybe even broken.
Her lips parted slightly when our eyes met. Shock. Recognition. Confusion. All written across her face like an open book I used to read daily.
And I felt it—just for a second.
That ache in my chest. The echo of everything we were. Of what she meant to me back then.
The late-night talks. Her laughter as we ran barefoot through summer streets. Her fingers pulling me back when the world pushed too hard.
She had been my escape. My calm.
But that was before.
Before I found her with him.
Before I felt the ground split beneath me.
Before I stopped believing in anyone.
Now, here she stood, applying for a job beneath me, unaware—or maybe completely aware—of who I'd become.
I forced my jaw to tighten, my expression to still.
"Miss Sinclair," I said, voice clipped. Controlled.
She flinched. Slightly. Almost imperceptibly. But I saw it. Felt it.
She didn't speak.
The silence grew thick.
And God help me, even through the haze of betrayal, I still noticed how her voice had deepened. How her eyes still searched for something in mine. How a part of me hated how beautiful she still looked.
But I had spent years building walls. Walls that were never meant to be breached—especially not by her.
I stepped around the desk slowly, anchoring myself in the present.
"You're here for the secretary position?"
She nodded. "Yes."
Her voice was soft. Steady. But I could hear it. The tremble beneath. The questions.
She didn't know why I left. Why I never came back. Why I never gave her the truth.
And maybe... I didn't want her to know. Not yet.
I gestured to the seat across from me.
"Then let's begin."
And just like that, we were no longer childhood friends.
No longer secrets and safety.
We were strangers with a past too painful to name.
But my pulse betrayed me. It remembered.
It remembered her.
Even if I swore I wouldn't.
I sat across from her with the same calm mask I'd perfected over years of war with my own past.
She thought she could walk in here, just like that. As if I hadn't spent years burying the boy who once loved her. As if she hadn't destroyed everything good I clung to.
But this was my world now.
And if Ava Sinclair wanted to step back into it, she would pay for the silence she left me in.
One way or another.