Chapter 1 - The Descent into Row Twenty-Eight
The neon glow of the cockpit door cast a harsh blue tint over my fingers as I stared down at my phone screen. Inside, my lead partner’s frantic text message flashed like a warning beacon: The acquisition team is waiting in Denver. We need your signature before midnight or Merritt Systems may accept Calder’s offer. Seven hundred and eighty million dollars hung in the balance. For nine solid months, I had traded my soul, my sleep, and any semblance of a personal life to position Prescott Technologies for this exact buyout. The medical platform we were acquiring could revolutionize neonatal care—a crusade born from the ghost of my infant sister, who had slipped away in a sterile hospital room when I was just six years old. I had convinced myself that amassing this ungodly fortune was the ultimate form of protection, a monument to a past I could never fix.
Then a red crayon rolled across the industrial carpet of the Boeing 737, bumping softly against the polished leather of my custom oxford.
"Sorry," a small voice piped up from the aisle. "It escaped."
I looked down. He couldn't have been more than two or three years old. Sandy-brown curls tumbled haphazardly across his forehead, and when he flashed a nervous, gap-toothed grin, a distinct, asymmetrical dimple appeared in his left cheek. My breath caught in my throat. I had stared at that exact reflection in the bathroom mirror every single morning of my life.
"What's your name, little guy?" I asked, my voice suddenly sounding foreign to my own ears.
"Luke."
Before I could process the surreal weight of that syllable, a voice from three rows back sliced through the cabin hum like a knife.
"Luke, sweetheart, come back here right now."
My chest seized. Blood rushed violently to my ears, drowning out the roar of the jet engines. I didn't need to turn around to know that voice, but my body betrayed me, pivoting backward with sickening dread.
Cassandra Hayes.
The woman I had loved with a fierce, burning desperation until she vanished from my world three years ago. She sat in row twenty-eight, her lap weighed down by a little girl who looked like she had been carved from the exact same mold as Luke. Her hair, once cascading past her shoulders in dark waves, was now shorn into a practical bob, framing a face etched with the undeniable exhaustion of single motherhood. But her eyes—those sharp, expressive hazel eyes—remained unchanged. And the little girl in her arms looked up at me with my own striking green irises.
"Damon," Cassandra whispered, the word escaping her lips like a deflating balloon.
My mind raced through a violent math problem. Three years since our bitter, abrupt breakup. The twins looked to be roughly two and a half years old. Our final night together in that cramped Seattle apartment—before my ambition swallowed our relationship whole—had been almost exactly nine months before they would have drawn their first breath.
"Who are these children?" I demanded, the executive command in my tone leaking out, replaced by raw terror.
Cassandra went entirely white. She opened her mouth, but before a sound could form, a flight attendant materialized beside my row, placing a firm, professional hand on my shoulder.
"Sir, you need to return to your seat in first class immediately. We are taxing for takeoff."
"We're going to talk," I told Cassandra, my eyes locked on hers, ignoring the airline employee.
"Not in front of them," Cassandra choked out.
Little Luke looked up between the two of us, his innocent forehead wrinkling in confusion. "Mama, do you know the angry man?"
May you like
Her answer cut deeper than any corporate board room rejection ever could.
"I used to."
