CHAPTER 1 

Caspian 

There’s a kind of silence that feels like violence.

It presses in on me now, thick as concrete, as the elevator climbs toward the twenty-seventh floor of Blake International—the only thing I inherited besides old money and older ghosts. Each flicker of the floor indicator sounds like a bone cracking in the dark. By the time the doors slide open, the world outside them feels too still to trust.

“Sir—Mr. Blake—your three o’clock is still waiting in the lobby.”
My new assistant flinches as the words leave her mouth, as if they might ricochet.

“Cancel it,” I say.

“But he—”

I raise one hand. A single, quiet stop.
That’s all it ever takes. I don’t yell. I don’t explain. I don’t need to.

I step into the glass-boxed expanse I designed like armor: chrome edges, slate floors, everything precise enough to shame a scalpel. The skyline cuts the horizon on every side, a panorama of glittering insignificance. Some people would stand here and feel powerful. I feel… orderly. Contained. Untouchable.

My phone vibrates on the desk. Saint Mary’s Hospice—Grandmother flashes across the screen for the third time today. I turn it face down, guilt humming like static beneath my ribs.

Grandmother Ruth is the only person who ever made this mausoleum of a tower feel warm. She raised me when my mother died delivering her “miracle heir,” and she kept raising me long after it should have been my father’s job. He preferred spreadsheets to bedtime stories, Marcella wine to conversation. A decade later a stroke took him, as if the universe decided statues don’t deserve heartbeats forever.

So I became what he loved—legacy in a three-piece suit, profit margins in cufflinks. The perfect weapon.

I unbutton my jacket, lower myself into the leather chair that knows my exact posture. The city glitters at my back; the office lights dim to dusk tones I programmed for efficiency. I answer no emails. I return no calls. I let the unopened bottle of fifteen-year bourbon in my drawer remain exactly that—unopened. Discipline isn’t a habit; it’s oxygen.

Yet discipline never saved me from what happened when I was eight.

People called me beautiful—a curse disguised as praise. My nanny repeated it with hands that slid where no hands should, murmuring that perfection must be earned. I remember her perfume: too sweet, too strong, clutching my skin like a second violation. I remember telling my father. Boys don’t get preyed on, Caspian, he said. Not boys like us. Not heirs.

But Grandmother believed me. She sent the woman away, held me through the shaking aftermath, pressed cinnamon-scented promises into the air that I was allowed to exist without being earned. She found me a therapist. I lasted four sessions—long enough to discover that peeling scabs in front of a stranger only made them bleed harder. Since then I’ve treated pain like a share too short: hold it at arm’s length, profit off the distance.

Grandmother sees the cost anyway. Last month, when I visited her hospice room—lavender walls, oxygen hiss, heart monitor beeps trying to stay polite—she squeezed my hand with paper-thin fingers.

“You’ve built everything except a life, Caspian.”

I had no answer.

“There’s no one else,” she whispered. “I don’t want to leave knowing the Blake name dies with me.”

The words burrowed deeper than I wanted to admit. Heir. Legacy. I’ve worn those labels until they fit like skin, yet suddenly they felt too small.

The room tilts now, oppressive in its order. I stand, tugging my tie loose even though I tied it only hours ago. Restlessness hums under my bones—a low-grade tremor therapy could never be named. I pace the length of the wall-to-wall windows, city lights shimmering like predators with perfect teeth.

My reflection follows me: immaculate charcoal suit, stethoscope-thin lines of exhaustion beneath the eyes, jaw carved from restraint. The kind of man Fortune Magazine prints before asking, How does he do it all?

The answer is simple:

I don’t.

The phone buzzes again—another hospice call, or maybe the board reminding me tomorrow’s investor pitch controls a billion-dollar merger. It doesn’t matter which. Both demand the one resource I haven’t figured out how to manufacture: presence.

I press my forehead against the cool glass, watching the traffic snake below. Down there, people buy dinner, miss trains, kiss for no reason. They fill the night with ordinary noise. Up here, silence grows teeth and waits to bite.

If Grandmother dies tonight, her last thought might be that her grandson can out-negotiate oligarchs but can’t return a phone call.

The thought lodges like shrapnel.

Before I can second-guess myself, I shrug on my coat and swipe the hospice address into my car’s nav screen. The elevator hums its descent, each level peeling away the veneer of invincibility. By the lobby I’m a man, not a company—pulse too fast, palms too cold, thirty-one years old and still afraid of good-byes.

Hand on the doorframe, I remember Grandmother’s request: Don’t let the name die with me. She never demanded heirs. She asked for life. The difference matters.

My heartbeat counts off seconds. One, two, three. Silence thickens, but tonight it doesn’t feel like violence. It feels like permission—a pause before a note resolves.

I step through the doorway.

Her eyelids flutter open. Blue-gray irises focus, bloom with recognition and something fiercer: relief. One corner of her mouth lifts; the IV tubing quivers with the motion.

“I knew you’d come,” she whispers, voice like wrinkled silk.

My throat locks. I push words through anyway. “I’m here, Grandmother.”

I take her hand—warm, bird-boned, alive. Touch doesn’t break me. It roots me. The storm outside can have the skyline; this room holds the only weather that matters.

For the first time in months, I allow myself to sit without straightening imaginary wrinkles. I listen to her breathing, the monitor’s metronome, the rain palming window panes. No board packets, no share prices, no ghosts.

Only the woman who chose love over legacy—and the heir learning those aren’t opposites after all.

Somewhere beyond these walls a neon-lit city keeps score, but tonight all I have to do is hold her hand and stay.

Tomorrow, I’ll figure out how to build a life worth inheriting.