The smell of burned rubber clung to me long after the flames were out.
It was there when the paramedics cut open my dress on the side of the highway, there when someone pressed an oxygen mask to my face. There when I woke under too-white hospital lights with my throat raw and my ears full of sirens that weren’t there anymore.
“Miss Rossi? Eva, can you hear me?”
I blinked hard. The world stayed doubled for a second—two ceilings, two IV poles, two silhouettes at the foot of my bed. Then they slid into one tall, immovable outline in a dark suit and another, broader one in a charcoal coat.
My father and a stranger.
Pain pulsed behind my eyes when I tried to sit up. The IV tugged at my hand; something beeped faster.
“Don’t move,” my father said, in that clipped, command-room tone he usually saved for board meetings and government calls. His salt-and-pepper hair was mussed, his tie crooked. That scared me more than the machines. Marco Rossi did not do crooked.
“I’m fine,” I rasped, and the lie scraped like glass down my throat. “Just a scratch. You should see the car, though. She definitely needs therapy.”
No one laughed. That was my second clue that something was very, very wrong.
The stranger stepped closer into the fluorescent light. Late thirties, maybe. Black T-shirt under the open coat, clean lines, no visible weapons, which meant he had at least three. Dark hair, cropped short. Eyes the color of cold coffee, flat and assessing.
He didn’t look like a doctor. Or a cop. Or security like the men who guarded the lobby of my building and let Sienna slip past because she brought them cupcakes.
He looked like a wall that had decided it was tired of being leaned against and now preferred to be driven through.
“Get out of my room,” I said, because if I didn’t claw back some control quickly, I was going to panic.
“He’s staying,” my father said. “Eva, this is Damian Hale.”
The name prickled in a place I didn’t want to acknowledge—memory of overheard conversations in my father’s study, low, tense voices, words like fallout and liability.
“Hale,” I echoed, stalling. “What is he, my lawyer?”
“He’s your bodyguard,” my father said.
The word dropped between us like a weight.
I stared at him. Then at the man—Damian—who didn’t so much as shift his stance.
“No,” I said simply. “Return to sender. I don’t need a—” I flicked a hand toward Damian, tugging my IV again. “Person-shaped cage.”
Damian’s gaze flicked to my hand, then back to my face. Completely blank. A robot, I thought wildly. My father had hired a robot. One with a jawline like a weapon.
“You were forced off the road,” my father said. “Driver’s dead. Your car looked like it went through a compactor. If the guardrail hadn’t held—” His voice snagged, barely, before he shuttered it. “This wasn’t a joyride gone wrong.”
Ice sluiced down the back of my neck. The accident replayed—headlights in the rearview, coming up too fast. The jolt from behind, the spin, sky and asphalt trading places. Glass exploding like stars. The sick, weightless moment when I wasn’t sure which way was up.
“It could’ve been anything,” I said, too quickly. I needed it to be anything. “Drunk driver. Brakes. I was—” I swallowed. “I might have been speeding. You know I—”
