Chapter 2
Sienna's POV
I didn't remember getting into the car. Didn't remember starting the engine or pulling out of the parking lot. One moment I was standing in the rain outside our apartment, watching Ethan's silhouette disappear behind the curtains.
The next, I was three blocks away, hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel, vision blurred by tears I couldn't stop.
I pulled over in front of a darkened café, killed the engine, and sat there in the sudden silence. The check Eleanor had given me was still in my coat pocket, burning like a brand against my ribs.
"You are just a mistake to me."
The lie tasted like ash, but I'd said it. I'd looked him in the eyes and destroyed us with words I could never take back.
My phone buzzed. His name lit up the screen.
I turned it off.
Rain drummed against the windshield, each drop like a nail in the coffin of what we'd been. The airport was twenty minutes away—twenty minutes to disappear from his life forever.
But the memory hit me anyway, sudden and vicious, dragging me under.
Twe years ago. San Francisco
The air conditioning had been broken for three days. Heat shimmered off the pavement four stories below, and even with every window open, the apartment felt like a furnace.
I sat on the hardwood floor in shorts and a tank top, ice cubes melting in my glass faster than I could drink. When Ethan emerged from the bathroom wearing nothing but black boxer briefs, water still beading on his chest, I forced myself to look away.
We'd been dancing around this for months.
"Still dying in here?" He dropped beside me, close enough that I caught his scent—soap and something darker, more dangerous.
"Unbearable."
He was too close. Had been too close ever since I'd moved into the apartment across the hall. Ever since my mother's diagnosis and Eleanor's "charity"—arranging for her ward's daughter to live near family.
Family. The word felt like poison.
"Sienna." His voice dropped, rough with something we'd both been ignoring. "Look at me."
I couldn't. If I looked—at the way his hair curled damp against his forehead, at the flush spreading across his skin, at those eyes that had been following me with increasing hunger—I'd cross a line we couldn't uncross.
"We can't." The words came out broken.
"Can't what?" His fingers found my chin, tilted my face up. "Say what we're both thinking?"
The air crackled between us. Outside, the city hummed with life, but in our bubble of broken taboos, there was only our breathing, heavy and uneven.
"This is wrong." Even as I said it, my body betrayed me, leaning into his touch.
"Is it?" His thumb traced my lower lip, and heat shot straight through me. "You're not my blood, Sienna. You never were."
"The world won't see it that way."
"Fuck the world."
His kiss shattered everything. Not the careful, almost brotherly pecks he'd given me when I cried about Mom's treatments. This was hunger unleashed—eight months of restraint exploding in an instant.
I should have pushed him away. Should have remembered Eleanor's lectures about propriety, about knowing my place.
Instead, my hands fisted in his hair, pulling him deeper. His body pressed against mine, and I felt everything—the scorching heat of his skin, his heart hammering against his ribs, the hard evidence of how much he wanted this.
Wanted me.
"Tell me to stop," he gasped against my neck, hands already tugging at my tank top. "Sienna, tell me to stop."
I couldn't form words. Not when his mouth found the sensitive hollow of my throat, when his teeth scraped my collarbone and made me arch against him like I was dying.
"Please," he breathed, and I didn't know if he was begging me to stop or continue.
But I was already lifting my arms, letting him strip the cotton away. Already gasping as his mouth closed over my breast, as his tongue traced patterns that obliterated every reason this was forbidden.
He carried me to his bedroom, where moonlight painted us silver and shadow. Where I could pretend we were just two people who loved each other, instead of a scandal waiting to explode.
His hands mapped every inch of my body like he was memorizing sacred text. When he whispered that he loved me—had always loved me—I let myself believe it could be enough.
When he moved inside me, when we found a rhythm that felt like coming home and falling apart simultaneously, I let myself believe we could build something real from stolen moments.
God, I was naive.
Now
I opened my eyes, back in my rain-soaked car. The memory felt like acid in my veins.
Three years we'd had. Three years of midnight visits and dawn escapes. Three years of family dinners where we sat at opposite ends of the table, pretending we were nothing to each other while our eyes spoke volumes.
Three years of the most devastating love I'd ever known.
And Eleanor had ended it with one conversation and a check I'd been too desperate to refuse.
My phone buzzed again.
Please don't do this. We can work it out. - E
I love you.
Come home.
I deleted them without reading the rest and threw the phone onto the passenger seat.
Seattle was waiting. A new life where I wouldn't have to pretend the man I'd die for was my uncle.
In the rearview mirror, San Francisco's lights grew smaller until they vanished completely.
Just like everything else I'd ever loved.
The highway stretched ahead, dark and endless.
