Your father, a powerful and ruthless CEO, built his empire alongside his best friend and business partner — a man you had grown up hearing about in stories of late-night deals and bloody corporate wars. Now that you had just turned twenty-three, your father decided it was time you stopped standing on the sidelines. His gift to you, as he so charmingly put it, was knowledge.

You barely had time to protest before he was dragging you down the sleek hallways of his towering office building, the click of his shoes echoing off the marble floors. Without ceremony, he shoved you into a cold, sterile meeting room and pushed you into a leather chair. The glass walls made you feel exposed, trapped under the sharp gazes of the company’s elite.

You adjusted your skirt, feeling wildly out of place in a room full of powerful men in suits, your heart hammering a nervous rhythm against your ribs. You weren’t prepared for this. You weren’t prepared for him.

The heavy door creaked open, and in he walked.

Ash.

He moved with a quiet, lethal confidence, like a predator surveying his territory. He dropped into the seat beside you without a word, his presence immediately consuming all the oxygen in the room. The scent of his cologne hit you first — deep and dark, woodsmoke and leather, wrapping around you like a noose. Your lungs refused to work properly.

Ash was a man who looked like he belonged at the head of a boardroom or in the middle of a street fight. His black hair was tousled, as if he had run a frustrated hand through it moments before. A few strands fell across his forehead in a way that made him look both rugged and devastatingly sharp. His jaw was cut from stone, shadowed with dark stubble that only made his full mouth seem sharper, crueler.

The jet-black suit he wore molded to his frame like a second skin, the fabric straining slightly across the breadth of his shoulders and chest. Where his sleeves pulled taut, you could glimpse the edge of ink curling up his biceps — tattoos peeking out like whispered secrets. They hinted at a wilder, darker part of him that had no place among stock reports and profit margins.

You knew who he was — you had always known. Ash Kade. Your father’s right-hand man. His best friend. His partner. At thirty-three, he was ten years older than you — a lifetime when you were younger, a chasm that now seemed to have narrowed into something perilously thin.

You could feel it — the forbidden heat curling low in your stomach. The awareness of him, of how close he was, of how your knees almost brushed beneath the table. Every fiber of your being told you this was wrong, dangerous. Ash was off-limits in every possible way. He was the man who stood beside your father, who helped build their empire with blood and ambition. He was the one your father trusted more than anyone.

But sitting this close, breathing in the ghost of his cologne, feeling the electric buzz that seemed to hum between your bodies — wrong had never felt so tempting.

Ash didn’t look at you, but you could see the slight tension in his jaw, the way his tattooed forearm flexed as he adjusted his watch. He knew. He had to know.

A beat of silence stretched unbearably thin.

”You planning on surviving this meeting, princess?” he murmured under his breath, his voice low and rough, barely audible to anyone but you.

You swallowed hard, your cheeks burning. His words were teasing, almost casual — but there was something simmering beneath them, something that made your skin prickle with awareness.

You nodded stiffly, unable to trust your voice.

Ash chuckled under his breath, a sound like velvet and sin. Then he leaned back in his chair, his thigh brushing against yours — deliberate, accidental, you couldn’t tell — and turned his gaze toward the front of the room, as if you hadn’t just become acutely, painfully aware of every inch of him.

And for the first time that day, you understood exactly what your father had meant by knowledge.

Some lessons were meant to be learned the hard way.