Adrian's pov:
The mahogany armrest beneath my hand felt like the railing of a ghost ship lost at sea, a polished, dead thing that offered no real grounding.
I sat in a row of men who traded in paper-thin theories and the safety of tenure, their soft faces glowing with the self-importance of the academic elite. I, however, dealt in a different trade: the cold, lethal currency of reality.
To my left, the Dean was still speaking.
His voice was a droning buzz, a swarm of useless words that felt miles away, like static from a radio losing its signal.
I didn't listen. I never did.
Instead, I let my gaze sweep across the auditorium.
It was a cavernous hall of gothic arches and gilded molding—grand, imposing, and yet, as I sat there, it felt suffocatingly small. The air was thick with the scent of damp wool, expensive floor wax, and the palpable, sickening scent of youthful hope.
I leaned back slightly, my expression a carefully crafted mask of bored indifference.
To the world, I was a man of stone, immovable and uninterested.
But beneath the charcoal wool of my suit, my pulse was performing a violent, jagged rhythm.
My morning had been a blueprint of absolute, surgical control. At 5:00 AM, the Manhattan skyline had been nothing but a silhouette of jagged glass against a bruised dawn.
I had stood in the living room of my penthouse on the sixty-first floor, the silence of my sky-high sanctuary so profound it felt heavy.
It was a place of white marble and sharpened edges, perched so high that the clouds often brushed against the floor-to-ceiling windows, whispering against the glass like restless spirits.
From that height, the world below was a plaything—a grid of lights and scurrying lives that I held in the palm of my hand.
I had moved through my routine with the grace of a machine.
I prepped breakfast for Lucas—a precise, high-protein meal he hadn't asked for, but one he needed if he ever intended to survive the crushing weight of the name he carried.
Lucas.
My younger brother.
There was a seven-year chasm between us, a gap of time that had forced me to become more of a warden than a sibling.
I kept him close, under my roof and under my iron-clad eye, because the world outside that penthouse was a predatory machine, and he was far too soft to be caught in its gears.
I recalled the way he had stumbled into the room this morning.
I'd seen that familiar, sharp hitch in his breathing the moment he noticed me standing by the window. He was terrified of my silence, of the way I occupied space as if I were oxygen and he were merely an uninvited guest.
I'd seen the twitch in his shoulders, the way he shrank into himself.
He was scared of me—scared of the silence I carried like a holstered weapon.
But I didn't soften. Fear was a better teacher than comfort ever would be. For his well-being, for the growth he lacked, he needed to be near the flame, even if the heat scorched the skin off his bones.
After the gym had numbed my muscles and an ice-cold shower had reset my internal temperature to absolute zero, I had armored myself for the day.
I hadn't wanted to give this speech. I had no interest in inspiring a thousand children who would inevitably shatter under the first sign of pressure. But the Board of Trustees required a face to go with the endowment, and today, that face was mine.
I had anticipated a day of grey, tedious boredom.
But, I was wrong.
My gaze shifted now, drifting with practiced, predatory slowness across the sea of faces until it locked onto the third row. My heart gave a single, thundering kick against my ribs.
There she was.
Fellon.
The flame-red hair was unmistakable—a vibrant, defiant streak of color that looked like a bloodstain against the drab grey of the auditorium.
Even from the stage, I could see the bone-deep tension in her frame.
I recollected the heat of her body when I had caught her at the gate an hour ago.
The phantom sensation of her waist beneath my palm still burned through the leather of my glove.
I had protected her from behind the curtains for a decade, pulling strings in the dark to ensure she stayed breathing, but I had never expected her to walk out of the shadows and stand directly in my path.
Seeing her here—on my territory, in the flesh—was a variable I hadn't prepared to calculate today.
Up close, the resemblance had been a sacrilege.
Her scent—a heady, grounding ache of warm sandalwood and the vanilla—had bled into my skin, a haunting, unwanted ghost, refusing to be shaken.
When she had looked at me in the rain, she didn't see a benefactor.
She saw a powerful stranger, her eyes wide with a primal, agonizing recognition she couldn't even name.
I had felt her heart hammering against my hand—the frantic, desperate heartbeat of a survivor. The heartbeat I had personally permitted to keep beating.
Now, from my vantage point on the stage, I watched her flinch as our eyes met.
It was a silent collision.
Two rows behind her, in the fifth row, I caught sight of Lucas.
He was sitting stiffly, looking small and swallowed by the gravity of the room. He didn't dare look up at me; he sat with his shoulders hunched, his eyes fixed on the floor, terrified of the sheer intensity I was radiating.
The air around me had turned lethal, and he was the only one in the room who knew how to read the signs.
"Now, it is my distinct honor to introduce… Mr. Adrian Sterling, please…"
The Dean's voice finally ceased, replaced by a roar of applause—a pathetic, hollow sound.
Reluctantly, I rose.
Every step toward the podium felt like an irritation, a performance I was being forced to give for people who didn't deserve a second of my time.
I stood before the microphone and looked out at the sea of hopeful, naive faces.
I didn't care about their "academic journey." I didn't care about their dreams. I wanted to tear the veil off their eyes and show them the abyss.
I didn't offer them inspiration. I offered them a mirror.
I spoke with a calculated cruelty, my voice a low, predatory rasp that seemed to strip the warmth from the very walls.
I told them exactly what they were: soft, unprepared, and clinging to the rotting anchors of a past that no longer existed.
I watched the smiles fade.
I watched the room turn cold as I explained that New York wasn't a city of opportunity, but a concrete jaw waiting to crush the marrow from the weak.
I locked my eyes on the redhead in the third row, pinning her to her seat with the sheer force of my gaze.
I made sure she understood that the protection I had once offered from the shadows was dead.
She was in my world now—the world of the visible, the world of the hunted. And in my world, there is no shield. There is only the hammer and the anvil.
I told them that half of them would be gone by the first frost, swallowed whole by their own ghosts.
I didn't hide my disdain for their optimism.
I gave them the harsh, jagged reality of the lion's den they had entered, ensuring they knew that the only way to survive was to become as heartless as the city that housed them.
I finished my speech and stepped back before the first palm could strike another in applause.
I didn't stay for the formalities. I didn't look at the Dean. I didn't look at Lucas.
I turned and walked off the stage, my heels clicking sharply against the wood like a countdown to an explosion. I tore through the faculty doors, needing to escape the suffocating, stale air of the auditorium.
The moment I was inside the isolation of my office, I slammed the door. The silence was instantaneous, but it provided no relief. I ripped the leather glove off my hand and stared at my palm.
It was shaking.
Just a tremor, a microscopic vibration, but in my world, it was a catastrophic failure of the system.
I'd spent my morning making breakfast for a brother who feared me and punishing my body in the gym, convinced that today would be just another boring, predictable rotation of the earth.
I was wrong.
She was here. She was real.
And now that she was within reach, I realized that no height in this city—not even my marble sanctuary on the sixty-first floor—was high enough to keep us both safe from what was coming next.
The fire I had watched eleven years ago was starting to burn again, and this time, I wasn't just a spectator.
I was standing right in the center of the heat.