I turned the corner.
And froze.
She stood near the bathroom in a black dress, looking lost, almost sickly green in the light.
What was she doing here?
CHAPTER 4
Anna
The thing about free cocktails is that nobody warns you about the third one.
The first one goes down easy. Sweet, cold, something with passion fruit and a little umbrella that Miley stuck behind her ear like a trophy. The second one goes down easier because by then the music is loud and the lights are low and you’ve stopped counting. The third one goes down because Miley puts it in your hand and says "You survived a week working for Satan in glasses, you deserve this," and honestly, she made a compelling argument.
But nobody tells you that the third cocktail on a stomach containing one spinach puff and raw optimism is where the evening takes a sharp left turn into chaos.
Rewind.
It had been a week since I started at Hunter Interactive. Five full working days, and I had seen Jace Hunter exactly zero times.
Not once. Not a glimpse through his office door, not a passing encounter in the hallway, not even an awkward elevator moment. The man was a phantom. He handled everything through email, video calls from behind a camera he never turnedon, and a scheduling app that communicated with the emotional warmth of a parking meter.
His office door stayed closed. I left documents on his desk before he arrived and they reappeared on mine with red-pen corrections and no commentary. For all I knew, he teleported in and out of the building specifically to avoid sharing oxygen with the woman who’d kissed him in a farmers market.
I was an assistant to a ghost who paid well and communicated exclusively in bullet points.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. I’d left a diner where customers screamed at me to my face for a corporate job where my boss couldn’t even look at mine. Progress.
Miley told me about a new club opening. Reverie. Free drinks on opening night. I don’t usually drink, and the last time I’d been in a crowded room with loud music and strangers pressing close, my body had locked up and I’d spent twenty minutes in a bathroom stall counting my breaths. But Miley said I deserved it, and I was too tired to argue. Too tired to be afraid, which was its own kind of freedom.
Three hours before everything went wrong, I was standing in Miley's bathroom staring at a black dress she'd draped over the shower rod for me. It was borrowed, elegant—a clean neckline, a low open back, and fabric that hung with just enough weight to follow the body wearing it instead of fighting it. I ran my fingers along the hem and felt something tighten in my chest, because I hadn't reached for anything that quietly beautiful since Charlotte, since gallery openings where I'd show up in heels with my portfolio under one arm and champagne in the other, back when dressing up felt like celebrating being alive.
Putting it on felt like trying on someone else’s skin. A version of Anna who hadn’t had her career torched, who hadn’t fled a city with two suitcases and lost a part of her she still struggled to find every day. A version of me that existed before my ex decidedthat destroying my life was easier than letting me walk away from his.
"You’re overthinking it," Miley called from the bedroom. "It’s a dress, not a life decision."
"It feels like a life decision."
"Everything feels like a life decision to you. Put the dress on. We’re going out. You’re gonna look hot, you’re gonna have fun, and if you argue with me, I’ll drag you there in your pajamas."
I put the dress on. It fit better than I expected. Miley appeared in the doorway, looked me up and down, and whistled.
"Charlotte’s loss," she smirked. "Miami’s gain."
The tightness in my chest eased. Just a little.
Reverie was packed when we arrived. Miley’s friend from the hotel had put us on the guest list, which meant we skipped the line and walked straight into a wall of bass and body heat and perfume that hit me like a wave.
The club was gorgeous. Dark walls with neon accents bleeding violet and rose across the velvet seating, a bar stretching the full length of the back wall with bottles lit from below in amber and gold and ice-blue, glowing like a skyline in miniature.
The light shifted with the crowd—catching the edge of a jawline, pooling in the hollow of a collarbone, turning strangers into silhouettes and compositions my brain assembled without permission. A woman near the bar tipped her head back laughing and the neon broke across her throat, and my fingers twitched at my side, muscle memory reaching for a camera that wasn't there.
I hadn't picked one up in months. The urge surprised me.
I let myself relax. Not all the way. I don’t think I know how to do that anymore. But enough. Enough to dance with Miley under the strobe lights, to laugh with a stranger who complimented my dress, to sip my drink and feel, for one night,like the person I used to be before someone decided to take her apart piece by piece.
Cocktail one. Cocktail two. Cocktail three.
