The Canadian winter was a cruel, unforgiving beast, clawing at the thin windowpanes of Avana's studio apartment in the outskirts of Toronto. The heating hissed and rattled, a dying mechanical lung that barely kept the frost from forming on the inside of the glass.
Avana sat on the edge of her narrow cot, her fingers still numb from the walk home. The silence of the room was heavy, smelling of cheap coffee and the graphite from her discarded sketches. On the scarred wooden table sat the piece of stationery—thick, cream-colored, and embossed with the silver hawk of the Slein family. The address felt like a death warrant.
She reached for her cracked phone, her thumb hovering over the contact labeled Maman. She needed to hear a voice that didn't sound like breaking ice.
The line clicked. "Avana? Chérie, is that you? It is so late, why are you awake?"
"I'm just finishing some drawings, Maman," Avana lied, her voice thickening with a lump she had to force down. She closed her eyes, imagining her mother's small kitchen three hundred miles away, the scent of dried herbs and woodsmoke. "I just wanted to hear your voice. How are you? Is the medicine helping your hip?"
"It is fine, it is fine. Don't worry about me. You focus on your exams. Only one year left, and then you will be the greatest architect in Canada. You will build towers that reach the stars, my brave girl."
Avana stared at her red, raw hands—hands that had spent the night scrubbing floors and clutching a stolen heirloom. "I know, Maman. I'm doing everything I can. I... I got a new opportunity. A live-in position. It pays much better. I'll be able to send more money home next month."
"A live-in position? With who?"
Avana looked at the silver hawk on the paper. "A family. They need help with their children. It's a good house, Maman. Very safe."
Safe. The word felt like ash in her mouth.
"I have to go sleep now. I love you."
"I love you, ma petite. Sleep well."
Avana hung up and pulled her knees to her chest. She stared at the address. Slein Manor. She didn't know how she would survive tomorrow, but she knew she couldn't let her mother's world collapse. She lay down, the cold of the Canadian night seeping through her thin blanket, and watched the shadows of the tree branches dance like skeletal fingers on her wall until her eyes finally drifted shut.
Thirty floors above the city, in the heart of the Axin Tech monolith, the lights were still burning in the CEO's office.
Francis Slein sat in the dark, the only illumination coming from the blue glow of his computer monitor. He wasn't looking at stock market tickers or quarterly projections. He was looking at a digital file: Dermis, Avana. Employee ID: 00902.
His long, elegant fingers traced the edge of the glass screen. He clicked on her original application, dated exactly two years ago.
He remembered that day with a clarity that bordered on a haunting. It had been one of those mid-November afternoons when the sky over Toronto turned the color of a bruise. A torrential downpour had turned the streets into rivers of slush.
He had been walking toward the private elevator, flanked by a phalanx of nervous executives, when the service doors had swung open. A girl had stumbled in, fleeing the storm.
She had been twenty then—just a girl, really—drenched to the bone. Her hair was matted to her forehead, and her cheap coat was heavy with water, but when she had looked up, wiping the rain from her eyes, the world around Francis had simply stopped. She was breathtaking. There was a raw, unpolished light in her eyes, a defiance against the cold that made his chest tighten in a way he hadn't felt since before the accident.
He had walked right past her. To her, he was just another suit in a sea of powerful men. She hadn't even blinked in his direction. But Francis had stopped ten feet away, his back to her, listening to the sound of her shivering breath.
He had watched her through the security feeds for seven hundred and thirty days.
He knew her habits. He knew she liked her coffee black. He knew she spent her breaks in the stairwell sketching buildings that would never be built. He knew she was twenty-two now, her beauty maturing into something sharper, something more dangerous to his peace of mind.
He reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a physical copy of her file. Taped to the corner was a small, candid photo taken for her security badge. She wasn't smiling. Her gaze was steady, her jaw set with a quiet strength that he found himself wanting to break—or perhaps, wanting to own.
He ran a thumb over the photo, over the curve of her cheek.
"The architect," he murmured into the silence of the empty office.
The theft of the watch hadn't been a coincidence. The security breach hadn't been an accident. He had built this trap with the same precision he used to acquire rival companies. He had waited until she was at her most vulnerable, until her 365-day countdown to freedom was close enough for her to taste it—only to snatch it away.
He stood up, walking to the window. The city of Toronto lay below him, shivering in the cold, but his mind was already miles away, at the manor where the nursery had been prepared and the guest wing was waiting.
He looked at the reflection of his own face in the glass—the face of a man who was rumored to have no heart. He didn't care about the rumors. He only cared about the girl in the small, freezing apartment.
"Welcome to my world, Nanny," he whispered, his voice dark and possessive, trailing off into a shadow of a laugh. "I promise you... you're never going to want to leave."
The diamond watch on his desk ticked rhythmically, counting down the hours until 8:00 AM. Counting down the seconds until Avana Dermis became his.