Eliana's POV

"Again," I said, swinging the bat as hard as I could.

The plate shattered against the wall. For a brief moment, the sound drowned out the voice in my

head that kept repeating the same three words. You're too much. That was the last thing he'd said

to me. Not goodbye. Not I'm sorry. Just those three words, tossed over his shoulder like they

meant nothing, before he left my penthouse and my life for good.

I picked up another plate.

"Miss Magnus, that's the last one in this rack," the attendant said from the doorway, speaking

carefully, as everyone always did with me.

I laughed. It sounded forced. "Bring another rack."

He didn’t move. He glanced past me instead at the man in the corner with his arms crossed,

waiting for a nod he wasn't going to get. Marcus had been watching me destroy a room full of

expensive dishware for almost an hour, and he hadn’t said a word the whole time. That was

Marcus’s way. He let me exhaust myself before he ever tried to talk sense into me.

"Are you done?" he finally asked, once the attendant left us alone.

"No."

"Eliana."

I dropped the bat. It clattered to the floor louder than I expected, making me flinch. That only

made me angrier because I was tired of flinching at everything. I was sick of being the type of

person who cried in rage rooms and got dumped on television screens by men who only wanted

my money.

There had been six of them this year. Six men, all different faces, all the same ending. The first

one told my father he loved me before he ever said it to my face. The last one, the one whose

voice still echoed in my head, waited until we had been together for three years before he

admitted the truth over dinner, in front of my father's business partners, like it was some kind of

joke that everyone else already understood. He said I scared him. He said loving me felt like

signing a contract I would hold him to for life. I had cried in the restaurant's bathroom for twenty minutes while my mother knocked on the

door, urging me to fix my makeup before the photographers outside noticed something was

wrong. That was what broke something inside me, not the breakup itself, but the fact that even

then, my mother's first thought was the cameras.

"He called me controlling," I said, my voice cracking. "Do you know how many times I've heard

that word this year? Controlling. Cold. Too intense. Like caring about someone is a crime now."

Marcus didn’t say anything for a moment. He just looked at me the way he always did, patient

and unreadable, the same way he had watched me since I was nineteen, when he first started

following two steps behind me.

"They don’t fall for you," he finally said. "They fall for the number attached to your name. You

know that."

"I know that," I replied, and my voice cracked on the last word. "I know that, Marcus. I've

known that since I was fourteen. Doesn’t make it hurt less."

I sat down on the floor, surrounded by broken plates, and let myself cry in a way I never let

myself do in front of my parents, my board, or anyone who mattered. Marcus crouched next to

me, careful of the glass, and for a long time, neither of us spoke.

"You know what the worst part is," I said, my voice thick.

"I actually believed him. Every single one of them. I keep thinking, this time is different. This

time, somebody actually sees me and not the company. And every time I’m wrong, and I still

don’t learn."

"That's not a flaw, Eliana. That's just hope."

"Hope's gotten me nowhere."

"Hope's the only reason you’re not exactly like your parents," he said quietly. Something about

that bluntness hit harder than anything else he could have said.

Marcus never sugarcoated things. He had worked for my family since before I could drive, and

somewhere along the way, he had become the only person who told me the truth, even when it

wasn’t kind. I thought about my mother's face at the restaurant, worrying about camera angles while I fell

apart just six feet away. I thought about my father, who called me twice a week, always about

earnings reports, never about anything that mattered to me. I was twenty-six, running a company

worth billions, and I couldn’t think of anyone outside of Marcus who had ever asked me how I

was really doing and waited long enough for the true answer.

"What if I disappeared," I said eventually. "Just for a while."

He looked at me sideways. "Disappeared how?"

"Not disappeared disappeared. I mean, what if nobody knew who I was? No last name. No

company. Just me." I wiped my face with the back of my hand, feeling foolish the moment the

words left my mouth. "Somewhere no one’s ever heard of Magnus Technologies."

I expected him to tell me it was a ridiculous idea. Instead, he sat quietly for a long moment,

really considering it instead of dismissing it.

"Paris," he said finally.

I blinked at him. "What?"

"You have an apartment there under a shell company nobody's ever traced back to you. New

name, new face if you want. I could pose as your brother, keep you safe without anyone knowing

who you are." He shrugged, as if he were suggesting a weekend trip instead of the most reckless

idea either of us had ever spoken.

"If you want to know if someone can love you without the money attached, that's the only way

you'll find out for sure."

My heart began to pound. Every rational part of me knew this was crazy. I ran a company worth

more than most small countries. I had a board meeting in six days. I had parents who would lose

their minds if they realized their only daughter had vanished on purpose.

But beneath all that, underneath every reasonable objection, there was something else.

Something quiet and starving in my chest since I turned eighteen and understood, for the first

time, that no one who said they loved me actually meant it.

"Okay," I said before I could backtrack.

"Let's do it." Marcus studied my face as if checking whether I meant it, whether the woman sitting on the floor

covered in broken glass really understood what she was agreeing to.

"You can't tell anyone," he said. "Not your assistant. Not your parents. Nobody."

"I won't."

"Not even when it gets hard. And it will get hard, Eliana."

"I’ve survived worse than hard."

"This is a different kind of hard," he said, and something in his tone made me look up at him.

"Right now, the whole world knows your name and treats you accordingly, for better or worse.

Out there, you’ll be nobody. No assistant to fix your mistakes. No security detail clearing a room

before you walk in. No father's name to open doors. People are going to say no to you, Eliana,

probably for the first time in your life, and you’ll have to deal with that instead of buying your

way out."

I let that sink in, turning it over in my head as I did with every serious decision before I approved

it. Part of me, the part that had been running a company since I was twenty-two, wanted to ask

for numbers, timelines, and contingencies.

But the other part of me, sitting on a floor of broken glass with mascara down my face, just

wanted to feel like a person again instead of a headline waiting to happen.

"Good," I finally said. "I want to feel something that isn’t handed to me because of who my

father is."

He nodded slowly, as if that was the answer he had been waiting to hear. "Then we start tonight.

I'll have everything ready by morning."

I nodded, and something in my chest settled for the first time in months, calm in a way I hadn’t

felt in a long time.