Kyle's pov
There are days when this house feels less like a home and more like a glass cage. Every wall gleams, every chandelier is positioned for elegance, and every corridor echoes with the weight of legacy. The Carlisle legacy. My father built it, my mother polishes it, and I'm expected to carry it forward without cracking.
The Carlisle Media & Telecommunications empire doesn't allow for weakness. My father reminds me of that every time I falter. "One day this will all be yours, Junior," he says, his voice gravel and commanding. "And when it is, you won't have the luxury of hesitation."
Hesitation. My crime of choice.
It's not that I don't want the company. It's that I've spent my entire life being prepared for it. Groomed. Tested. Evaluated. There's hardly a choice left in the matter. I just want to breath sometimes.
The only time I breathe is when I'm with Kairo. She's seventeen, loud, impossible, spoiled to the bone, but she's also the only real piece of family I let myself soften around. Dad sees her as a liability at times, Mom sees her as fragile porcelain. I see her as… Kairo. Annoying, stubborn, but mine to protect.
And she's been failing spectacularly at school.
Which is why I'm standing in the foyer on a Wednesday afternoon, scrolling through emails, when I hear her voice dripping with sarcasm. "You're the tutor?"
I glance up.
Not the clipboard-carrying, sharp-suited academic I was expecting. Instead, there's a girl in faded jeans and a satchel slung across her shoulder. She doesn't look like she belongs here. Not in this house of polished marble and chandeliers, and yet, something in the way she carries herself makes her seem less like an intruder and more like someone who simply doesn't care to fit in.
Her eyes meet mine. For a moment, it's like being caught staring at the sun, you're not supposed to, but you do anyway.
Kairo's smirk deepens, waiting for the girl to squirm, but she doesn't. Ouch!!!
"Kairo Carlisle, I presume?" the tutor says, steady, her voice clipped with just enough confidence to sting.
My sister blinks. It's rare for anyone to speak to Kairo like that, especially staff.
I find myself watching more closely. Suddenly, Camilla [My ex] comes from God-knows where. She kisses my cheek and I'm repulsed and I tense up immediately.
Every nerve in my body bristled at the contact. My jaw clenched so tight I thought I might crack a tooth. I didn't have to look at the tutor to know she'd seen it, the way Camilla slid in behind me like she still owned me, like she could just claim me with the brush of lipstick on skin.
I hated her. God, I hated her. Not just for the kiss, not just for the way she smiled afterward like she'd scored a victory, but for every year of my life I'd wasted believing she was something she wasn't.
Camilla Roberts had broken me in ways I'd never imagined were humanly possible.
There was a time, not too long ago, when I thought she could be my forever. Perfect hair, perfect smile, perfect charm, everything my parents could possibly want from my wife. Everyone in our circle adored her, and I let myself believe I did too, but I was naïve, what I had mistaken for love was nothing more than manipulation dressed in perfect pretence. Every lie she told me and everyone around me, every excuse she made, every time she twisted my words back on me, I let it chip away at me until there was barely anything left of me.
When it finally ended, I wasn't free. I was humiliated. Shattered in ways no one could ever fix.
The emptiness she left behind consumed me. Nights blurred together in hotel rooms, in bars, in strangers' beds. Dozens of faces, dozens of bodies, none of them meaning anything. I told myself it was freedom, the bachelors life. That I was proving I didn't need her, but each time I left before sunrise, each time I walked away without even remembering their names, I felt smaller. Pathetic. Like I'd reduced myself to nothing more than a man chasing ghosts he could never catch.
I hated the person I became in those years. I hated the weakness of heartbreak and betrayal. The way I kept hoping, deep down, that someone would make me feel alive again, the way I thought Camilla once had.
And worse than my shame was the disbelief in my parents' eyes, because no matter how many times I told them the truth, no matter how many stories of her dishonesty, her lies, her cruelty I tried to share, they wouldn't hear me. To them, Camilla could do no wrong. She was the golden daughter they wished they'd had clearly. My word meant nothing against her rehearsed tears, her flawless mask of innocence.
That was when I ran.
I called it an opportunity. "A career move." but the truth? Taking the job in Tokyo wasn't about ambition, it was escape. I felt guilty for leaving Kai alone here, but Carlisle International needed someone to manage the branch, and I needed to disappear. For three years, I buried myself in work. I told myself it was a fresh start. A chance to forget the wreckage Camilla had left behind, but no amount of twelve-hour days, no skyline views, no endless streams of contracts and boardrooms could fill the hollowness she carved into me.
Three years, and still the humiliation clung to me like a scar that wouldn't fade.
And now here she was, kissing my cheek in front of the tutor like nothing had changed. Like she hadn't ruined me, like she hadn't turned me into someone I could barely recognize.
Not this time.
I wasn't that man anymore, the man she broke, the man who begged his parents to believe him, the man who ran halfway across the world just to never see her ever again.
Not anymore.
Because now… now I've got my head screwed right, and for once, I wasn't running.
I continue looking at the tutor. There's a quiet strength in her. Something guarded, yes, but she seems strong, and it unsettles me, because people don't usually come into this house with walls stronger than ours.
Mom sweeps into the hallway then, pearls around her neck, smile polite but assessing. "Ah, you must be the new tutor. Come in, dear. Kairo will show you to the study."
The girl nods, offers a small smile in our direction, then follows Kairo down the corridor, but I'm still standing there, staring at the space she just occupied.
I should go back to my emails. I should call my father about the merger idea. I should doing the thousand things that Carlisle men are meant to do.
But instead, I find myself listening for the echo of her footsteps as she disappears into the study.
Why?
She's just a tutor. Another stranger passing through the Carlisle machine, hired to clean up a problem we'd rather not talk about publicly.
And yet… there was something in her eyes. Not deference, not ambition. Something else. A history I don't know, written in the way she squared her shoulders against Kairo's jabs.
The world is full of people who want something from me. Status. Favours. Proximity to the Carlisle name, but this girl , Coco, I think her name was , didn't look at me like I was anything special. She looked at me like I was just… a man standing in a hallway.
It's ridiculous, but as I head upstairs, I catch myself glancing once more toward the study door, wondering what kind of storm we've just let into this house.