Chapter 1

Ethan Holt had never imagined that Evie Sterling would one day walk away from him.

He had funded her for ten years, caged her for ten years, and convinced himself she would wait forever.

For Sophia Grant, he slapped Evie, locked her up, and stripped away the last voting shares her family had left her.

He trampled all over her love and still believed she would come back.

Only after Lucas Grant took her into his protection, married her, and placed an empire in her hands did Ethan finally lose his mind.

He wrecked his own legacy, survived a fall into the sea, and crawled back from hell like a possessive ghost, all for one purpose.

To take her back.

Evie only gave him one answer.

"Ethan, the debt is repaid. We will never see each other again."

The world called him a madman for chasing after his lost love.

Lucas Grant only held his wife closer and said with lazy contempt,

"Ethan's taste has always been terrible. Lucky for me, he let me steal the prize."

Everyone in Harbor City knew Evie Sterling was Ethan Holt's pretty little ornament.

What no one knew was that the obedient face he kept beside him had spent three years tangled in a secret affair with the man who had sponsored her since childhood.

That night, Ethan returned from Wall Street after three years abroad.

The first event on his schedule was a private charity cruise.

In the VIP suite on the top deck, the air itself felt overheated.

Evie was pinned against the glass with her wrists tied by his necktie, the city lights glittering behind her and Ethan's cold, handsome face burning with possessive madness in front of her.

"Ethan... that hurts..."

He bit down at the back of her neck in answer.

"Three years apart and you've already forgotten how to please me?"

She cried quietly and let the tears fall.

For three years she had lived on one sentence alone.

Wait for me to come back.

She had turned away every admirer and spent those years like a doll suspended on strings.

When he was done, Ethan buttoned his shirt and put his mask back on.

Then he lit a cigar and said, as casually as if he were discussing the weather,

"Tomorrow the Holt and Grant families will formally announce the marriage alliance."

Her hands froze over the hem of her dress.

"You're getting married?"

"Yes." He looked down at her without emotion. "I'm marrying Sophia Grant. You're marrying her brother, Lucas Grant."

The room spun.

Lucas Grant.

The ruthless head of the Grant family.

"Why?" she whispered. "You told me to wait for you."

"I told you what I needed to tell you."

His voice turned colder.

"Sophia is different. She's clean. She can stand beside me in public. You can't. The Holt family supported you for ten years. It's time you repaid that debt."

Clean.

That word sliced her open.

So that was all she had ever been to him.

A dirty little secret.

She barely knew how she got out of the suite.

Her dress hung crooked. The mark on her neck burned. Tears blurred her vision.

At the corner of the hall, she ran straight into a broad chest that smelled faintly of cedar.

She looked up and found herself face-to-face with a man in a black overcoat, tall, controlled, and dangerous in a way that did not need to be announced.

His gaze dropped to the bite mark on her neck.

Then his mouth curved.

"Ethan's taste," he said softly, "is still as bad as ever."