The Apex Holdings Trilogy · Book 1
Ruin
Every rule she lived by was written for a reason.
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Ivy Sinclair runs on discipline. The scholarship that pays for her training, her apartment, the tower she lives in, the life she rebuilt after the last one broke her, comes with exactly one rule she trusts: never let a gift make you forget to ask why.
Killian Steele owns the tower. He owns the program. And when he offers her an arrangement no scholarship covers, precise, consensual, entirely on his terms, asking why stops being simple.
He built an empire on control. She survived on it. Neither of them planned for what happens when the man across the table stops running the play and starts telling the truth.
Some doors, once opened, never close the same way.
A taste of Ruin
CHAPTER ONE: FULL RIDE
Rule 1: Never let a gift make you forget to ask why.
— Ivy —
Four counts in, her supporting leg went.
Not much. A tremor at the top of the standing thigh, in and gone inside half a second, invisible from the hallway and invisible in the mirror at any distance past three feet.
She saw it. She always saw it.
"Again," Ivy said, to a room with nobody in it, and reset the count.
She ran the adagio six more times. On the last one her calves were burning and her breath had gone thin and high in the top of her chest and the noise in her head had finally shut off, which was the whole transaction. Discipline in, quiet out. It was the only equation she'd ever found that balanced every time you ran it.
The clock over the barre said 4:52.
Freshman year she'd have run for the car. She had driven the four blocks between Professor Ahn's studio and the tower enough times by now to know exactly what they cost — six minutes with the lights against her, four with them for her — so she took the bun down, and put it back up, and left at 4:53.
* * *
The car was a gray hatchback with a gas card in the console, and it was not hers.
She kept that straight. It came out of LuxAutique's stock on the bottom two floors of the building she lived in. It went back down there when it needed anything. She logged her mileage on the first of every month, which was the only thing anybody had ever asked her to do about it.
Her father had put three transmissions through the same Ford rather than carry a payment.
She logged the mileage.
* * *
Third floor of the garage, student section. The receptionist on thirty-one waved her past without checking a list, the way she had for about a year.
The small conference room. Not his office. It had never once been his office.
He was already there.
In two years Ivy had never beaten Killian Steele into a room.
He took up more of it than the furniture accounted for — heavy through the shoulders and chest, gray coming through the black in his hair and in the beard he kept close, and a way of standing she'd learned to read the way she read dancers. Nothing wasted. Weight forward. Sleeves rolled for the afternoon, ink down both forearms to the wrist, and on his right hand the heavy old ring, plain, that he had never explained and she had never asked about.
"Sinclair." He didn't look up from the folder. "You're early."
"Don't get used to it."
"I never do." He looked up then and did the thing he did, one unhurried pass, cataloguing — keeping whatever he needed and dropping the rest before it cost him anything. "Sit. Water's there."
She took the bottle, dropped into the chair, let the bag go off her shoulder onto the floor.
"How's the knee."
"Full adagio. No buckling."
"Good."
One word. He did not hand those out, which was the entire reason they were worth anything.
[…continued in the book]