Chapter 1
Nia Santos had exactly sixty minutes to decide if she was going to upend her entire life for a man she’d known for three years only as a ghost and three weeks as a problem.
She stood in her kitchen with the velvet box open in her palm, the diamond catching the blue light from the security camera feed on her laptop, and she thought: this is the part in the movies where the woman says yes or no and either way there’s a chase scene.
Outside, the SUVs had circled. Five black vehicles arranged with the particular geometry of people who had done this before, who knew exactly how much space to leave, how many exits to cover, how to make a house feel like a coffin without breaking down the door.
Her phone showed three text messages she hadn’t answered. One from Marcus, who had somehow seen the vehicles on his commute home and was doing the thing where he pretended he wasn’t panicking by sending very factual updates about position and number. One from Zoe, who was at her own apartment and whose message read: is this about the neighbor because I feel like this is about the neighbor. One from Grandma Gigi, which was just a string of prayer hands and a photograph of the pink taser.
Leo slept upstairs, utterly indifferent to the shape of his own future.
Jyn stood at her kitchen table with the rain-dark patience of someone who had waited for things before and understood that waiting was not the same as losing. He’d taken off the wet jacket. His white shirt was still perfect, because Jyn appeared to be a man to whom ordinary indignities like rain did not fully apply. Thor sat at his feet, occasionally glancing toward the front of the house, ears tracking sounds at frequencies humans couldn’t reach.
“Sixty minutes,” Nia said finally.
“Fifty-three now,” Jyn replied.
“Do you actually have a plan, or is this just a very expensive panic?”
Something shifted in his expression. Not offense — more like recalibration. He had expected her to be afraid. She was afraid, but it was apparently not the kind of afraid that shut her mouth.
“I have a plane,” he said. “A compound in the Bernese Oberland. A security team that my enemies haven’t been able to compromise. I have two dozen lawyers who have been building a case against the Chong family for eight months, waiting for the right evidence.” He paused. “And I have a son I didn’t know existed until tonight who I would like to keep alive.”
The word son landed differently the second time he said it.
Nia sat down at the kitchen table.
“Tell me about the Chong family,” she said.
Jyn looked at her for a moment. She could feel him deciding something — how much to give her, how much she needed, how much was too much for a woman who was still technically a stranger regardless of what DNA and memory said.
“They are a rival family,” he said. “In the business I was born into.” He didn’t define the business. She didn’t ask. The five SUVs outside were definition enough. “We have been in conflict for two decades over shipping rights in three ports and a very old grudge. The Chong family has been trying to destabilize my position for years. The bloodline issue is real — there are ancient contractual arrangements about succession that give legitimate heirs certain protections under the old agreements. A male heir in the Jyn family changes the balance of power significantly.”
“Because of an old contract.”
“Because in my world, old contracts are the only law that everyone respects.”
Nia absorbed this. “And when you say business—”
“Import and export,” Jyn said. “Legal. Entirely legal, now. My father built what he built, and I spent fifteen years making it clean. Which is why the Chong family’s leverage over me has shrunk to nothing except personal pressure.” He looked at his hands. “A child is the oldest kind of personal pressure.”
