Justin's POV
The gala had been a miscalculation.
I stood at the floor-to-ceiling window of my own penthouse, a space as austere and functional as a ship's bridge. It held the view, a state-of-the-art kitchen I never used, a bed, and a desk. That was all. There were no personal photographs, no souvenirs from vacations I'd never taken, no lingering scent of a woman's perfume. My life was a blueprint of efficiency, a direct response to the chaotic, messy poverty of feeling that had defined my past.
And I had miscalculated with Prudence Smith.
The note on the gala invitation had been a risk. I'd wanted to get under her skin, to bypass the corporate firewall and see the woman I'd caught a glimpse of in our first meeting.....the one whose eyes held a universe of intelligence, fountain of knowledge and a ghost of old pain. I'd seen it, recognized it, because it was a ghost I knew intimately.
The dance had been… more than I'd anticipated. Holding her, feeling the tension in her body slowly yield to the music, to my lead, had been a victory more satisfying than any acquisition. The mercury gown had been a declaration of war, but the woman inside it had, for a few fleeting moments, been a temporary peace treaty. She had felt right in my arms. A perfect, maddening fit.
And then I'd ruined it by leaving with Eva.
It wasn't a lie I'd told her. It was the truth, surgically edited. Eva was the daughter of a major investor. It was a political handshake. But my motivation for allowing Eva to cling to me so publicly was more complex, more selfish. I'd felt Prudence's walls crumbling in my arms, and a part of me, the part that had learned trust is a prelude to disaster, had panicked. I'd created distance, re-established the public narrative of Justin Steele, the unattainable billionaire, to protect myself from the terrifying allure of her vulnerability.
I saw the look in her eyes as I walked away. The shutters slamming down. The ice reforming. I'd felt like a bastard. And I'd felt a profound sense of loss for something I'd only just found. I felt weird letting her go
Hence, the all-day strategic session. A professional strategy to force my way back into her orbit. I needed to see her, to prove to myself that the connection I'd felt was real, and to prove to her that I wasn't the scum she thought I was.
The woman in the Mercury coloured dress today… God, she was magnificent. A Valkyrie of commerce. She had fought me with every weapon in her arsenal, her mind as sharp and relentless as a diamond-tipped drill. She was everything I'd built my own company to be: ruthless, brilliant, uncompromising.
And when I'd challenged her, publicly, about the soul of her own brand, I'd seen it again, that flicker of the woman beneath the CEO. The one who understood yearning because she'd yearned. The one who understood vulnerability because she'd been vulnerable. She hadn't shattered. She'd absorbed the blow, recalibrated, and come back stronger. My respect for her, already considerable, had solidified into something unshakable.
She was the most intoxicating, infuriating woman I had ever met.
And she wanted nothing to do with me.
A familiar, cold loneliness settled in my chest. It was an old companion. I turned from the city lights and walked to my desk, opening a locked bottom drawer. Inside, there were no financial documents. There was a single, faded photograph.
It was of me, at twelve years old, standing beside my father. We were in his workshop, both of us covered in grease, grinning like fools. He had his hand on my shoulder, his grip strong and sure.
Ethan Steele. The best man I've ever known.
He hadn't been born into money. He'd built his wealth from literal scraps, starting with a single tool truck and a backbreaking work ethic. He built Steele Industries from the ground up, not as a faceless conglomerate, but as a company that manufactured precision parts for the aerospace industry. "We don't sell widgets, son," he'd tell me, his voice rough with pride. "We sell integrity. We sell a promise that a plane will stay in the sky."
Our house wasn't a penthouse. It was a sprawling, messy home in Connecticut, filled with the smell of my mother's cooking and the sound of my father's laughter. He was a giant of a man, with calloused hands just like mine, who could talk for hours about metallurgical stress tolerances and then spend the afternoon teaching me how to throw a curveball. He was and still is the strongest and bravest man I know
The memory is a physical pain, even now.
It was a Saturday. Unseasonably warm for early fall. I was fifteen. Dad was in the garden, battling an overgrown rose bush he'd been meaning to tame all summer. He was sweating, laughing, complaining good-naturedly about the thorns.
"Pass me the clippers, Jus," he said, wiping his brow with the back of his arm.
I handed them to him. As he reached for them, a bee, disturbed from the blossoms, buzzed angrily around his head. He swatted at it absently.
"Damn things," he muttered, not with anger, but with the mild irritation of a man interrupted in his task.
The bee landed on his neck. He jerked. "Ouch! Little bastard got me."
I laughed. "Serves you right for disturbing his home."
He chuckled, rubbing the spot. "Yeah, yeah. Help me get this last branch, then we'll go get a burger."
We finished the bush. He seemed fine. A little red around the sting, but nothing alarming. We got in his old pickup truck, the one he refused to replace, and headed into town.
We were at a red light, five minutes from home, when he started coughing.
"You alright, Dad?"
He didn't answer. He was clutching his throat, his breaths coming in short, ragged wheezes. His face, which had been flushed from the heat, was now turning a terrifying shade of mottled red and blue.
"Dad?" My voice was a squeak, terror seizing my fifteen-year-old heart.
His eyes were wide, bulging with a panic I had never seen in them. He looked at me, a silent, desperate plea, and then his body went rigid before slumping against the steering wheel.
The car behind us honked. The light was green.
I don't remember how I got him into the passenger seat. I don't remember driving the last two blocks to the hospital. I only remember the sensation of his heavy, limp body as I half-dragged, half-carried him through the emergency room doors, screaming for help.
The doctors tried. They pumped him with epinephrine, fought for over an hour. But it was too late.
Anaphylactic shock. A severe, undiagnosed allergy to bee venom.
My father, the giant, the man who built an empire with his bare hands, was killed by a insect no bigger than my thumbnail.
The world didn't just shift; it shattered. The foundation of my life, built on his strength and his love, turned to dust.
The funeral was a blur of black suits and hollow condolences. And then, the vultures descended.
My uncles, my father's brothers, whom I'd only ever seen at Christmas, suddenly became very involved. My mother, shattered by grief, was no match for them. They swooped in with lawyers and documents, speaking a language of "estate management" and "minority shareholder rights" that my mother didn't understand.
They argued that a fifteen-year-old boy and his grieving widow couldn't possibly run a multi-million dollar company. They launched a hostile takeover, leveraging obscure clauses and exploiting my mother's emotional state. Within six months, they had wrested control of Steele Industries from us.
The money, the houses, the cars, all of it, everything my father had built was gone. We were left with a small, rapidly dwindling life insurance payout and a mountain of legal fees.
The family I thought I had, the people who were supposed to be our shelter in the storm, had stripped us bare and left us in the rain.
We moved from our beautiful, messy home into a cramped, two-bedroom apartment that always smelled of someone else's cooking. My mother retreated into a silence from which she never fully emerged. She got a job as a receptionist, her spirit broken.
I watched the light go out of her eyes. I watched the woman who used to fill our home with music and laughter become a ghost. She wasn't just grieving her husband; she was grieving the life he'd built for her, the future he'd promised, the security that had been violently ripped away.
I made a vow then, standing in that shabby apartment, listening to my mother cry softly in her room. I would get it all back. Every last penny. Every shred of dignity. I would rebuild what they had stolen, and I would build it bigger and stronger than my father ever had. I would become so powerful that no one could ever take anything from me again.
I started working. I washed dishes, stocked shelves, mowed lawns. I went to school during the day and worked until midnight. I slept four hours a night. I didn't have friends. I didn't have dates. I had a goal.
I got a scholarship to a state school for engineering. I majored in business. I lived on ramen noodles and rage. In my final year, I used every cent I'd saved, plus a mountain of student debt, to launch my first company, a software to optimize manufacturing supply chains. It was my homage to my father.
It failed. Spectacularly. I was too green, too arrogant. I trusted the wrong partner, who embezzled what little capital we had and left me holding the bag. I was twenty-two, drowning in debt, with a failed company and a bruised ego the size of a continent.
It was the anvil upon which I was truly forged.
Failure wasn't an option. It was a lesson. I learned about contracts, about due diligence, about the cold, hard calculus of human nature. I hadn't just lost my father; I'd lost my inheritance to family. I'd lost my first company to a partner. Trust was a currency I could no longer afford.
I took a job as a grunt in a logistics firm. I worked my way up, learning everything, from the warehouse floor to the C-suite. I lived like a monk, pouring every spare dollar into paying off my debt and building a new nest egg. For five years, I was a ghost in the machine, my entire existence dedicated to the singular purpose of resurrection.
Then, I launched Titan. I started in the male grooming sector because it was a market ripe for disruption, but the name was no accident. I was building something colossal, something that could not be toppled. I worked eighteen-hour days. I was the first one in the office and the last to leave. I knew my product, my market, my numbers, better than anyone alive because I had nothing else. No hobbies. No relationships. No life.
My mother passed away a year before Titan turned its first real profit. She never saw me succeed. She died in that small apartment, a ghost of the vibrant woman she'd been. The last piece of my old life was gone. The only thing left was the mission.
Success came, not as a wave, but as a rising tide. It was slow, then all at once. Steele Industries was reborn, bigger and more powerful than before. I bought out my uncles' company, the hollowed-out shell of my father's legacy, and fired them in a boardroom meeting that lasted thirty-seven seconds. It was a hollow victory. The money was back. The power was back. But my father was still gone. My mother was still gone. The boy I had been was gone.
Women came and went. Beautiful, intelligent, ambitious women. They were distractions. Pleasant, temporary diversions. I was charming when I needed to be, generous always, but I never let them in. They saw the billionaire, the titan of industry. They didn't see the fifteen-year-old boy watching his father die. They didn't see the young man eating ramen in a dark apartment. They didn't see the engine of relentless drive that was fueled by loss and a promise made to a broken woman's memory.
How could they? I never showed them.
And then I walked into a boardroom at Provida Emporium and met Prudence Smith.
I saw it in her eyes instantly. The same fire. The same story, written in a different key. She wasn't just a successful CEO. She was a fortress, just like me. She had built her walls high and thick, and she manned the battlements with a vigilance I recognized all too well.
She was the first person I had met in over a decade who felt like a true equal. Not in net worth, but in essence. In crucible-forged strength.
The attraction was immediate, visceral, and profoundly unsettling. It wasn't just about her beauty, which was considerable. It was about her mind. Her resilience. The haunting vulnerability she hid beneath a layer of permafrost.
I wanted to unravel her. I wanted to know what tragedy had built the fortress of Provida. I wanted to see if the woman inside was as magnificent as the queen who ruled it.
And selfishly, I think I wanted to see if she could unravel me. If she could see the man behind the Titan. And if, upon seeing him, she wouldn't run for the hills.
In the conference room that day, when I'd challenged her, I'd seen a crack. Not in her armor, but in the narrative she told herself. I'd seen the founder, the artist, the woman who understood the raw, human yearning that power was meant to protect you from. She hadn't just defended her position; she'd reclaimed a piece of her soul. And she had done it with a grace under pressure that had left me in awe.
I put the photograph of my father back in the drawer and locked it. The ghost of his laughter echoed in the silent penthouse.
I didn't have time for women. I had an empire to run. I had a past to outrun.
But Prudence Smith wasn't a woman. She was a force of nature. She was a mirror. And looking into her was the first time I had felt so truly, terrifyingly seen since I was fifteen years old.
The game had changed. This was no longer a merger. It was a reckoning.
And for the first time in my life, I wasn't sure if I was the anvil or the metal being pounded into shape.