The summer they first met was the summer the world felt too big — and somehow, too small for just the two of them.
Celia Vance was fifteen, dressed in ivory lace at a party she hadn't wanted to attend. He was Julian Hale: seventeen, dark-eyed, reckless smile, heir to an empire he already seemed to despise.
They found each other in a marble corridor, away from chandeliers and polite laughter. Celia remembers thinking his gaze felt too honest for a boy raised among secrets.
"You look like you want to disappear," he teased, voice low, leaning against the wall as though nothing in the world could touch him.
"Maybe I do," she whispered back, surprised at her own honesty.
For a breath, the hallway felt like theirs alone — shadows soft, the air heavy with unsaid things.
"If you go," Julian murmured, stepping closer until she could see the flecks of gold in his dark eyes, "take me with you."
The words shouldn't have meant anything. But to two hearts born into family legacies of cold ambition, they meant everything.
Celia smiled then — small, real. And Julian, for the first time, smiled like it hurt.
Years later, after betrayal and silence, she would remember that night. The hush between them. His voice, low and sure:
"Don't run from me, Cee."
And in that moment — before everything fell apart — she hadn't wanted to.