"If you haven't had Columbia's food truck tacos, have you even lived?"
Marcus slapped Ethan on the shoulder.
The sound was swallowed by the crowd noise.
Ethan smiled.
Easy. Practiced. The exact right amount of enthusiasm for a Friday afternoon.
"Yeah, let's go."
It was 5 PM.
Columbia University's main quad was doing what it always did at this hour — exhaling.
Students poured from the library doors in waves, loud and laughing, backpacks half-zipped, someone always shouting someone else's name across the lawn.
The air smelled like autumn leaves, food cart smoke, and the particular kind of freedom that only existed between the last class and dinner.
This was the life Ethan Cole had built for himself.
At 17, he was already an anomaly on campus — a full scholarship freshman, 6'2", sharp features that made people look twice, the kind of stillness in his eyes that made people look away.
He'd learned early that stillness made people uncomfortable.
So he'd built a layer over it.
Loose shoulders. Easy smile. The occasional laugh at exactly the right moment.
He'd been performing "normal college student" for four months now.
He was good at it.
They had just crossed through the main gate onto Broadway when the car appeared.
It didn't pull up.
It arrived.
A black Mercedes-Maybach, so clean it looked like it had been rendered rather than driven, glided to a stop at the curb.
The kind of car that didn't belong on a college street.
The kind of car that made the students nearby go quiet without knowing why.
Marcus let out a low whistle. "What the..."
Ethan stopped walking.
His smile didn't change.
Not a single muscle in his face moved.
But something behind his eyes did — a switch flipping, a light going flat and cold.
Shit. They found me.
Four months. He'd been careful.
New SIM card every three weeks. Cash only. No social media. A dorm room registered under a different address.
He'd been so careful.
The rear door opened.
A man stepped out.
White dress shirt, no tie, dark sunglasses despite the overcast sky. His face looked like it had been assembled from sharp angles and bad decisions.
He didn't scan the crowd.
He didn't need to.
His eyes went straight to Ethan.
"Ethan."
The voice was flat. Heavy. The kind of voice that had never once asked for anything.
"Let's go. Mr. Sinclair is calling for you."
Not a request.
Marcus turned to him slowly. "Who is that."
It wasn't really a question.
It was Marcus trying to understand why a guy in a car like that was looking at his roommate like he'd been looking for him for a long time.
Ethan took one breath. Measured it.
Not family. He didn't recognize this man. Which meant this wasn't the threat he'd been running from.
But it was still a threat — a public street, a crowd of students, broad daylight. A scene here was a tactical error. Getting into the car was the correct move.
He hated that it was the correct move.
"Go ahead without me," Ethan said.
His voice came out soft. The easy smile was gone, replaced by something that felt more like his actual face — calm in a way that had nothing to do with being relaxed.
Marcus stared at him. "Ethan, you're not seriously—"
"Marcus."
Just his name. Quiet. Final.
Marcus went quiet.
He'd heard something in Ethan's voice that he couldn't name and didn't want to push. He looked at the man by the car one more time, then back at Ethan, then walked away.
Slowly. Glancing back twice.
Ethan looked at the open car door.
Game over, he thought. New one begins.
He got in without hesitation.
Which even he found strange.
The door shut behind him with a pressurized thud — heavy, airtight, sealing the sound of the street outside like it had never existed.
The interior smelled like leather and something faintly chemical, like new money trying to smell like old money.
The seats were cream-colored. Untouched looking.
Ethan sat back and said nothing.
The man from outside — Kane — settled into the passenger seat. The driver, a compact, expressionless man named Reid, pulled smoothly into traffic without being told.
In the rearview mirror, Reid's eyes flicked to Ethan once.
Then to Kane.
Kane's jaw tightened slightly. Just slightly.
The kid's not scared. Ethan heard the thought in the silence between them, as clearly as if it had been spoken. Not a single question. Not a word.
Ethan kept his eyes on the window.
Let them be confused.
He was mapping the route in his head.
Left on Riverside. South on the highway. Then east, away from Manhattan.
This wasn't the way to any address he'd researched. This wasn't the way to any threat he'd prepared for.
Then who are these people?
Sinclair.
He knew the name. Everyone knew the name.
Sinclair Group — real estate, biotech, private equity, three senators' worth of political access. The kind of company that appeared in Forbes profiles and congressional hearings in the same quarter.
Not organized crime.
Worse.
Legitimate power.
The car turned through a gate that Ethan hadn't seen coming — white, twenty feet tall, no windows, guards on both sides who pulled it open before the car even slowed.
Beyond it was a different world.
A property so large it had its own internal road. A house — calling it a house felt wrong — of white stone and glass, surrounded by lawns so perfect they looked painted.
Ethan felt something he rarely felt.
Genuine surprise.
This is a new player.
He was led through a marble entrance hall by Kane — Italian stone floors, the kind of silence that cost money to maintain, a servant who set down a glass of water without making eye contact and disappeared.
Ethan sat in the chair he was directed to and looked at the room.
No personal photos. One abstract painting, enormous, meaningless. A side table with a single orchid in a white pot, perfectly healthy, perfectly lonely.
Nobody actually lives here, he thought. This room is a message.
The door to his left was heavy oak, framed in dark stone.
Ethan looked at it once, then away.
The walls were thick. Deliberately so.
Whatever was happening on the other side of that door, he caught nothing but the faint rhythm of voices — not words, not meaning. Just the sound of a conversation he wasn't meant to hear.
He picked up his water.
Waited.
Behind that door, three men stood around a table that had seen worse arguments than this one.
"—have you lost your mind, Victor?"
Charles's voice was clipped. Controlled anger from a man who'd learned to keep it controlled.
"A grandfather's will? A genetic marker? What is this? Just pay the boy off. End this."
"No."
Victor Sinclair didn't raise his voice. He never needed to.
"You don't understand, Charles. The will is just the paperwork. That's not the real issue."
"Then what is?"
A pause. Deliberate.
"The boy is bonded to Aria. His life force is linked to hers. Our specialists confirmed it. If something happens to him — if he dies — Aria..."
Silence swallowed the rest of the sentence.
The third man, older, slower, spoke carefully.
"Then the curse is real."
"Yes."
Victor again. Tired now. Like a man saying something he'd spent weeks trying not to say.
"She won't make it to twenty. Not without him near her. Killing him is killing Aria."
The room held that for a moment.
Charles looked at the door.
Beyond it, a seventeen year old boy sitting in a waiting chair, drinking water, not knowing any of this.
"He doesn't know."
"No," Victor said. "And he won't. Not yet."
Ethan set down his glass when the door opened.
Two men walked out — one middle-aged with the face of someone who'd lost an argument they'd been having for years, one older with the careful movements of someone whose body had started disappointing him.
Neither looked at Ethan.
Kane appeared in the doorway a moment later.
"Mr. Sinclair will see you now."
The office was large.
Dark wood, leather, the smell of expensive paper. A desk the size of a dining table.
Behind it, Victor Sinclair — fifty-something, silver at his temples, the kind of handsome that came from power rather than genetics.
He looked at Ethan the way men like him looked at problems.
Assessing. Categorizing.
On the desk, a thin blue file. Stapled to the cover, a grainy photo. Long-distance. His dorm building. His window circled in red pen.
His name written below it in neat, black letters.
Ethan Cole.
"Sit," Victor said.
Ethan sat.
He looked at the file for exactly one second longer than necessary — long enough to confirm what he'd seen, not long enough to show it had landed.
"You know who I am," Victor said.
Ethan let his shoulders drop just slightly. Widened his eyes by a fraction. Put just enough uncertainty into his voice.
"You're... Victor Sinclair."
"Good."
Victor studied him. The assessment in his eyes didn't shift.
He doesn't believe the act.
"I'll be direct. We don't have time for anything else."
A beat.
"Your engagement is to my daughter, Aria."
Real confusion broke through the performance before Ethan could stop it.
What.
Of everything he'd mapped out in the car — threats, leverage, extraction routes, worst-case scenarios — this had not been on the list.
Not even close.
He let the confusion mix with something that looked like anger. Stood up fast enough to push the chair back.
"What kind of joke— I don't know any Aria. I've never met your daughter. I'm leaving."
He walked to the door.
The brass handle was cold under his palm.
"If you walk out that door."
Victor's voice hadn't changed.
No anger. No threat in the tone. Just the flat, absolute certainty of a man who had never needed to raise his voice to be believed.
"You won't make it back to campus."
Ethan's hand stopped.
He turned around slowly.
The performance was gone now — the slumped shoulders, the wide eyes, all of it dissolved. What was left was just his actual face, which was something considerably colder.
He looked at Victor Sinclair and felt, for the first time since getting in the car, something close to real surprise.
He means it.
Victor brought his hand down on the desk.
The sound cracked through the room like a starter pistol.
"Sit. Down."
Ethan sat.
And somewhere, in the back of his mind — in a place he'd never been able to explain or locate or silence — something stirred.
Not fear. Not anger.
Something older than both.
[ Unknown Process Detected ]
[ Initializing... 1% ]
The notification appeared at the edge of his vision like a smudge on glass.
Gone before he could focus on it.
Ethan blinked.
What the hell was that.