Chapter 1

Cora Weiss signed the delivery receipt with her own hand, the pen scratching over the signature line, and did not think about Derek Hale at all. That was the trick, she had learned, to mornings like this: she thought about the paper. The weight of the pen. The way the carbon copy sat dark and final under her thumb. The delivery receipt said the black hypercar had arrived at the Meridian showroom at 8:47 a.m., and Cora believed in paper trails the way other people believed in luck.

She wore the oatmeal canvas coat because it was warm and because she liked the way it made people underestimate her. It was a strange kind of armor, being plain. It let her hear what people actually thought before they remembered who she was. Her family's name was on the holding company that owned this showroom, but that name was a staircase she had climbed down a long time ago. She had wanted to be loved for herself. She was still figuring out whether that had been a mistake.

The showroom smelled of clean leather and cold polished stone. Mid-afternoon light came through the tall windows in warm sheets, catching the black hypercar on its low platform at the center-back. It was a three-million-dollar car, and it looked it. Cora stood near the front edge of the platform, not touching it, just looking, the way you look at a horse you know you will never ride.

Then she heard the laugh.

It was sharp and bright and cut across the marble like a dropped fork. Priya Chandra. Cora recognized the laugh before she recognized the face, because Derek used to play it for her on his phone in the apartment they shared, back when he had an apartment at all. Cora's chest went tight and still, the way a deer goes still in headlights. She did not move.

Derek was walking across the showroom floor with Priya on his arm, and he was laughing at something she had said, and then he saw Cora. His face did a complicated thing: surprise, then recognition, then a smile that was already sizing her up. He looked at her coat. The smile widened.

"Well," Derek said, letting go of Priya's arm, "if it isn't the barista."

Cora stood very still. She had practiced being still. "Hello, Derek."