Amber's POV

ALMOST TWO YEARS AGO, NEW YORK CITY

The elevator in the penthouse building didn't just move. It glided in a silent silver capsule, rising forty-two stories above the midtown roar.

I adjusted the collar of my plain grey scrubs. My palms were damp against the leather strap of my bag.

"He's a shark, Louise. Even in the dark, he bites."

That had been the final warning from Mrs. Williams at the agency.

She'd sat me down in her office, looking at me with a mixture of pity and desperation. I was their last resort. In the three months since his accident in a high-speed crash that had robbed Logan Sutton of his sight and his mobility, he had gone through twelve caregivers.

Some had left in tears within the hour. Others had been fired for the sin of breathing too loudly or offering a word of sympathy.

But the salary on the contract was more than I'd made in a year. It was 'blood money,' as the other girls called it. But to me, it was a ticket.

It was the fund that would finally let me cut the strings my father still held over my life. I didn't need him to like me. I just needed his bank account to bridge the gap to my freedom.

The doors chimed softly and opened directly into a space of luxury.

The penthouse was massive, but every motorized shade was drawn tight. The air was chilled to a precise degree, and the space smelled of expensive scotch.

"Mr. Sutton?" I called out, my voice sounding small in the vast space.

"I didn't authorize a visitor," a voice rasped from the shadows near the floor-to-ceiling windows.

I followed the sound toward a high-backed motorized wheelchair. Even though he was slumped, the man in it was intimidating.

He was broad-shouldered, his frame lean and powerful, but he looked like a statue left out in the rain. His jaw was shadowed by several days of stubble.

"I'm Louise. The agency sent me to replace—"

"To replace the last incompetent fool? Or the one before that?" He didn't turn his head. The bitterness in his tone was enough to fill the room.

"Well..."

"Save yourself the walk back to the elevator. I don't need help. I don't want a nurse. And I certainly don't want a witness to this."

He gestured vaguely at his useless legs.

"I'm not a witness, Mr. Sutton," I said, walking further into the room.

"Oh, please..." he scorned sardonically.

"I'm your new employee. And according to my contract, I have a three-month trial period that you can't terminate without a written cause approved by your family. So, unless I drop you or poison your tea, I'm staying."

That got a reaction from him. His head tilted, his nostrils flaring as he hunted for the source of my voice. "A lawyer's tongue and a servant's heart. How charming."

"It's called being practical," I countered.

He laughed bitterly. "You're just like them."

"Like who?" I asked curiously.

"Like the incompetent people your company sent to look after me. I caught some of them trying to sell my pictures to the tabloids."

I heard of that too. Sadly, some people would do such an act for money. "I'm not like them, Mr. Sutton."

"I don't believe you."

I went over to the side table, where a half-empty glass of scotch sat dangerously close to the edge. I picked it up. "The place is a mess. You've fired the cleaning crew, too, haven't you?"

"I don't like strangers touching my things."

"Then it's a good thing I'm not a stranger. I'm the little buzzing nuisance who's going to make sure you don't starve in this expensive cave."

He let out a sharp laugh. It wasn't a happy sound, but it was a crack in the ice. "You think you're different? You think I won't break you by Friday?"

"Mr. Sutton, I grew up in a house where the silence was louder than the shouting. You're just a man in a dark room. You don't scare me."

I moved toward the kitchen to start the kettle, the clink of the glass in my hand the only sound in the penthouse. I felt his stare following me like an invisible weight.

He couldn't see me, of course. But he was listening. He was cataloging the time of my walk and the clip of my voice.

"Fine, Bee," he muttered.

"Excuse me?"

"I will just call you 'Bee.'"

I frowned at him. "Bee? My name is Louise, Mr. Sutton."

"Bee suits you better," he answered. "You smell like honey, anyway."

I instinctively smelled myself.

His fingers gripped the armrests of his chair until his knuckles turned white. "Buzz all you want. Just don't expect me to make it easy."

I looked back at him, at the broken king of Manhattan. I felt a strange and tightening pull in my chest. "I never expected ease, Mr. Sutton. I just expected work."

***

I didn't realize that working for him would become a psychological siege.

He made it his mission to make my life a series of impossible tasks.

"The tea is too hot, Bee," he'd rasp, shoving the porcelain cup away so violently that it sloshed over the marble.

"It is not!" I protested. I made sure it was warm, not hot, as he prefers.

"Did you think my tongue was as dead as my legs?"

I was in utter disbelief, but I chose to keep my mouth shut. This was my first day. I wouldn't give up, however difficult he could be.

Ten minutes later, I brought him a fresh cup. "It's warmish. I'm not an infant. Take it back."

I didn't argue. I just sighed and simply walked back to the kitchen, my jaw set so tight it ached. I knew what he was doing.

He was testing the structural integrity of my patience. He was looking for the hairline fracture that would let him shatter me like the others.

He refused to let me use the motorized shades, keeping the penthouse in a perpetual twilight. He'd sit in the center of the living room for hours, a silhouette of bitter elegance while listening to the stock tickers on a text-to-speech program at double speed.

The robotic voice filled the apartment with a mechanical chatter that made my skin crawl.

"You're hovering," he barked at me. He was gripped by a restless energy as his fingers drummed an irregular beat on the armrest of his chair.

"I'm dusting the bookshelf," I said calmly, moving a cloth over a first-edition Hemingway he'd likely never read again.

"Liar."

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him how he knew when he couldn't even see what I was doing. But I was afraid that he would go ballistic with my sarcasm.

Instead, I just choose to prevail. "There's enough grit on these covers to start a beach."

"I don't want you touching the books. I don't want you moving the air." He turned his head toward me, those hauntingly beautiful blue eyes staring through my soul.

It was unnerving, the way he could aim his intensity so accurately without a single spark of visual data. "Why are you still here, Louise? The agency has ten other broken millionaires who would treat you like a saint. Why stay here?"

I stopped dusting and looked at him. I noticed the way his hair was starting to curl at the nape of his neck because he wouldn't let a barber near him and the way his expensive silk shirt hung a little loose on his shoulders.

"Because I was assigned here, Mr. Sutton," I answered diplomatically.

"Bullshit!"

"It's the truth, Mr. Sutton," I insisted. "I like the silence of this place, even when you're trying to fill it with noise."

He went still. The frantic drumming of his fingers stopped. For a moment, the ice king mask slipped, and I saw the raw edges of the man underneath. The daredevil who had lived for speed was now trapped in a body that felt like a cage.

"You have a strange voice. Do you know that?" he muttered, his brow furrowing. "It's like velvet."

"It's just a voice, Mr. Sutton."

"No," he whispered, almost to himself. "The others chirped. They sounded like glass breaking. You sound like a gentle person."

"What?"

He shook his head as if clearing a fog. "Get me my scotch. And don't skimp on the ice. I want to feel something cold."

I walked to the bar, my heart doing a strange thing in my chest. He was starting to catalog me not as a nurse, but as a presence.

I handed him the glass, my fingers grazing his for a fraction of a second.

He flinched as if burned, but he didn't pull away. He just gripped the glass, his knuckles white and those sightless blue eyes fixed on the dark window where the city lights he couldn't see were beginning to flicker.

"Go home, Bee," he said, his voice devoid of its usual bite. "The sun is down. You've earned your blood money for the day."

I left him there, a lonely king in a glass castle, and realized with a jolt of terror that I was no longer just sucking it up for the paycheck. I was starting to wonder what lay beneath the ice.

***

The next morning, the elevator doors opened to the same oppressive silence. I stepped out, and the sharp scent of coffee from the travel mug in my hand acted as my only shield against the gloom of the penthouse.

Logan was exactly where I had left him, or perhaps he hadn't moved at all. He was silhouetted against a sliver of light from a gap in the heavy drapes, his profile looking like it had been carved from granite.

He was dressed in a fresh shirt, but his jaw was still tight and his entire posture radiated hostility.

The moment my foot hit the marble, his head snapped toward the sound.

"You're late," he rasped.

"It's 8:01, Mr. Sutton," I answered evenly, despite the way my stomach performed a nervous somersault. "The agency contract says eight. I'm sixty seconds late because the elevator had to stop for a delivery on the thirty-fourth floor."

I walked into the kitchen and set my bag down. I could feel his sightless blue eyes tracking the sound of my movements. I knew he'd expected me to quit. I knew he'd expected the 'Bee' to have been swatted away by the sheer weight of his misery the day before.

"I didn't think you'd actually come back," he said. There was a sliver of genuine surprise beneath the frost in his voice.

"Is that so?"

"Most of them would use the 'family emergency' excuse by dinner time on day one."

"I don't have a family to have emergencies with," I lied easily, thinking of my father's cold house in Oakridge. "And I don't walk away from a contract. I'm here for the work, Mr. Sutton. Not for the company."

He turned his chair toward the kitchen, the motor whirring with a soft sound. "Work? You want work? Fine. We'll start with the archives."

He spent the next six hours trying to bury me. He had me reorganize his entire physical library with thousands of leather-bound volumes by the date of the first edition's publication.

Since he couldn't 'see' the spines, he sat in the center of the room like a grand inquisitor, demanding I read him the copyright page of every single book.

"Wrong," he would snap if I paused for more than a second. "That's the third printing. I want the first editions in the north alcove. Move them."

My arms ached from the weight of the heavy tomes. My throat grew dry from reading aloud. Every time I finished a section, he'd find a reason to make me redo it.

He was looking for a break. Maybe something like a sob, a slammed book, or a muttered curse. He wanted me to prove that I was just as fragile as the others before me.

"You're still breathing," he remarked around noon, his voice dropping into that dangerous register.

"I am," I said proudly.

"Most people would be shouting at me by now."

"Shouting is a waste of energy," I said, climbing down from the library ladder. I wiped a smudge of dust from my forehead, and I felt the sweat dampening the back of my scrubs.

"You think so?"

"Yes. And I'm quite fond of the books. It's better than listening to that robotic stock ticker."

He gripped the armrest of his chair, his knuckles white. The fact that he couldn't break me was clearly infuriating him.

Those glacial blue eyes were fixed on my face as if he could search for a sign of weakness he could exploit.

"I'm going to make you hate this room, Louise," he whispered. His tone was dark with promise. "I'm going to make you hate the sound of my voice. By Friday, you'll be begging the agency for a different assignment."

"Then you'd better start thinking of a harder task, Mr. Sutton," I countered, picking up the next stack of books. "Because I'm just getting started."

I didn't tell him that every time he called me 'Louise,' it felt like a fresh layer of armor. He didn't know who I was. He didn't know about the scandal in Oakridge or the mayor's daughter who was currently playing a role.

To him, I was just a stubborn girl in grey scrubs.

And as long as he kept fighting me, he wasn't looking at the cracks in my own heart.

By four o'clock, the library was a graveyard of leather and dust, and my back felt like it had been fused into a permanent arch.

Logan hadn't moved from his spot in the center of the room. He sat there like a silent judge, his head slightly tilted as he tracked the sound of me shelving the final set of encyclopedias.

The silence in the penthouse was heavy with the unspoken frustration of a man who had tried to break a woman and failed.

"That's the last of the north alcove, Mr. Sutton." My voice was raspy from hours of reading copyright dates and fine-print publishers' notes. I climbed down from the ladder, the soles of my shoes squeaking softly on the marble.

He didn't offer a 'thank you.' He didn't even acknowledge the work I had done for him. He just shifted his weight in the chair, his sightless blue eyes fixed on a point somewhere above my left shoulder.

"Friday is still three days away, Bee," he said in an ominous rumble. "There are more rooms in this place. More ways to spend your time than playing librarian."

"I'm sure you'll find them," I replied, pulling my bag onto my shoulder. I walked toward the elevator, the cool air of the hallway already calling to me. I stopped at the sensor as the chime echoed through the penthouse.

I turned back one last time. He looked so small in that massive, darkened room. A billionaire with the world at his feet, yet trapped in a prison of his own making.

For a split second, the anger I felt toward his arrogance softened into something dangerous. Something like empathy.

"Goodbye, Mr. Sutton," I called out.

He didn't respond. He just gripped the armrests of his chair, a statue of bitter blue ice.

"And don't bother setting your watch," I added with a small and defiant smirk tugging at my lips. "I'll be at your door at exactly eight o'clock tomorrow morning. I wouldn't want to give you a reason to cite a breach of contract for being sixty seconds late again."

As the elevator doors slid shut, cutting off the image of him sitting alone in the dark.

I leaned my head against the cool metal wall and closed my eyes.

I was exhausted. My muscles were screaming. The man I was working for was a monster. But as I stepped out into the humid New York evening, I felt a surge of something I hadn't felt in years.

He thought he was the one in control. He thought he was the hunter. But he didn't realize that in Oakridge, I'd survived far worse than a grumpy billionaire.

I'll be back tomorrow. And the day after that. Because Logan Sutton might have lost his sight, but he was about to realize that he'd finally met someone who refused to stay in the dark.

The first month had begun. But I had no idea that the man trying so hard to push me away was the same man who would eventually make me never want to leave...