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"Some men don't fall in love. They consume it — until it becomes them."
Chapter 1: An Ordinary Girl in an Extraordinary World
Jane Williams had always believed that happiness lived in small things. The smell of coffee on a Tuesday morning. The way sunlight filtered through the curtains of her tiny apartment bedroom. The sound of her best friend Maya's ridiculous laugh echoing down the university hallway. These were the things that made her life feel full, even when her bank account screamed otherwise.
She was twenty-two, a third-year literature student at Westbrook University in London, and she had exactly fourteen pounds and thirty pence in her purse, half a packet of chocolate biscuits in her bag, and a boyfriend who smelled like cigarettes and told her she was "the best thing that ever happened to him" at least three times a week.
Life, by most accounts, was good.
"Jane! Jane, wait up!" Maya's voice cut through the noise of the campus corridor like a foghorn through fog. Jane turned to see her best friend barreling toward her, dark curls bouncing, a coffee cup in each hand and somehow not spilling a single drop. It was, frankly, a miracle.
"One of these is for you," Maya announced breathlessly, thrusting the cup into Jane's hand before she could protest. "And before you say anything about owing me — you don't. This one's because Professor Hartley gave me a B-plus on my essay and I'm choosing to celebrate rather than cry."
Jane laughed. "A B-plus is good, Maya."
"It's not an A." Maya's expression was deeply tragic. "It's basically failure with extra steps."
They fell into step together, weaving through the crowd of students rushing to morning lectures. Jane sipped her coffee — oat milk latte, her favourite — and felt that familiar warm contentment settle in her chest. This was her world. Books and lectures, late-night study sessions, bad cafeteria food and Maya's endless dramatic monologues. It was uncomplicated. Safe. Hers.
"Are you seeing Luke tonight?" Maya asked, her voice carefully neutral in the way it always got when Luke came up in conversation. Jane had noticed it months ago but never pushed. Maya was loyal to a fault; if she had opinions about Jane's boyfriend, she kept them buried deep.
"He said he'd come over around eight," Jane replied. "We're ordering pizza and watching that new thriller on Netflix."
"Thrilling," Maya said flatly.
Jane nudged her. "Not everyone can have your thrilling social life, Maya. Some of us enjoy a quiet evening."
"A quiet evening at twenty-two," Maya muttered into her coffee cup. "Tragic."
Jane just smiled. She didn't mind quiet. She'd always been the steady one — the girl who coloured inside the lines, who submitted her assignments on time, who called her mother every Sunday. Her parents, both schoolteachers in Bristol, had raised her with the firm belief that a good life was built slowly and carefully, like a house made of quality bricks. No shortcuts. No drama. No storms.
She could not have imagined, on that perfectly ordinary Tuesday morning, that the storm was already moving toward her. That somewhere in the cold gleaming offices of a building in Mayfair, a man was looking at a photograph of her face and feeling something shift inside his chest — something he had not felt in thirty-three years of ruthless, bloodstained living.
She couldn't have known. How could she?
She was just an ordinary girl.
She had no idea what was coming.
~ * ~
The evening with Luke was fine. It was always fine. That was the word Jane's brain kept returning to, though she never said it aloud, because "fine" felt like an insult to something that was supposed to feel like love.
Luke Harrison was handsome — dark-haired, athletic, with an easy charm that had swept Jane off her feet in their first year. He played football for the university team, had a laugh that filled rooms, and said all the right things at the right times. They'd been together for eight months. He called her "babe." He remembered her birthday. He met her parents and charmed them completely.
Everything about him was exactly what it should be.
So why, Jane sometimes wondered in the quiet dark of three a.m., did something feel slightly off? Like a painting hung just a millimetre crooked — not wrong enough to ruin the room, but impossible to stop noticing once you'd seen it.
She told herself she was being ridiculous. She told herself this was what real, adult love felt like — steady and comfortable, not the breathless fictional nonsense she read about in her literature courses. She told herself, quite firmly, to stop overthinking.
"You're quiet tonight," Luke said, stretching his arm along the back of the sofa. The credits of the movie were rolling; Jane had barely registered the last forty minutes.
"Just tired," she said, leaning her head on his shoulder. He pressed a kiss to the top of her head.
"Get some sleep, babe. I'll head off soon."
She nodded. His phone lit up on the coffee table — a message notification. He glanced at it quickly and the screen went dark again. Jane didn't see the name. She didn't think to look.
She should have looked.