Chapter 1
Zoë
The business building smells like burnt coffee and ambition—both stale, both overpriced. My notebook is warm under my arm, the pages a brick of margins I’ll pretend are strategy later. Around me, chairs scrape back, conversations bloom, and the room exhales like it’s glad to be done thinking for the day.
Someone behind the professor asks if the exam review is posted yet. Laptops snap shut in a staccato rhythm that always means one thing: late afternoon, and the campus about to tilt toward whatever comes next.
That smell clings. It always does. Like expectations that don’t know when to leave.
Halfway down the aisle, the air shifts.
Pressure registers at my back—pace matching mine, distance closing with intent. A presence you clock before youacknowledge it. Before you decide if you’re annoyed or already behind.
I don’t turn. I don’t have to.
Gio Rossi slips into my wake like the decision was made before I ever felt him there.
Instinct lengthens my stride, muscles recalibrating to the body crowding my peripheral vision. He matches it without effort—measured, controlled—built for rooms that open ahead of him, for momentum that expects cooperation. I register him before I look: a drop in temperature, the subtle bend of focus in his direction, the kind of gravity that follows men who assume space will be made.
Assuming compliance, always.
Something in my spine bristles. Sharp. Immediate.
The reaction hits before my brain can veto the input—a traitorous stutter that reads as provocation more than attraction, a flare that insults my intelligence. Pulse racing anyway, adrenaline snapping to attention at a man who is ninety percent problem and ten percent charm. Worse, he clocks the shift before I decide how to classify it.
Damn it, anyway.
A sideways glance is enough. The impact lands, cold and irritating.
His hair is still damp from the rink, dark strands curling at the ends like they refused instruction. His face holds that familiar precision—clean lines, jaw set, a mouth that looks like it knows exactly when to smile and why. Brown eyes catch mine and hold, steady, tracking me with a focus that drives irritation straight up my spine.
Recognition sits there. Awareness. Like he’s already catalogued the tension tightening my chest and decided to let it burn. Like he’s stepping back to calculate the cost of my composure.
That edge hits fast. The fact that he’s here—now, right after class, timed down to the minute—sharpens it.
“Zoë.”
His voice cuts through the noise, deliberate and weighted. It presses close, testing the boundary without permission.
Skin tightens. Reflexive, instant.
I keep moving, forcing my tone flat. “If this is about group participation, I carried you.”
“Strategic silence,” he replies, words rolling off his tongue with casual arrogance.
The hallway doors swing open, spilling us into the chaos of the main corridor. Light floods in, noise rises, and focus locks on the narrow gap between us, the way he claims it as if ownership is assumed.
“You contributed exactly one sentence,” I retort, the air outside thinning around me.
“An excellent sentence,” he counters, unbothered. “I pointed out the flaw in the marketing strategy.”
“You said, ‘We’ll circle back.’”
“And we will,” he says, smooth. “Eventually.”
The corner of my mouth betrays me, lifting before I catch it. I weaponize it immediately, reshaping my expression into something sharper.
Annoyance flares. Timing—that’s his weapon. He waits for the guard slip and steps into the opening. That’s what makes him dangerous. Precision.
