Author's Preface
Chantell kept herself buried in work, splitting every spare second between directing rehearsals and desperately searching for a new apartment. She refused to live anywhere a person like Maxine Pritchard had power over her life. In her frantic rush, she completely failed to notice the dark sedan trailing her every move.
Thursday rolled around, bringing opening night ever closer.
Ian made a surprise appearance at the auditorium, showing up with armfuls of coffee and boxes of fresh pastries for the cast and crew to apologize for his recent absence. Just like Chantell had done the first time she saw him, the drama students oogled him relentlessly as he handed out drinks, his charm working effortlessly on the entire room.
Chantell stood near the edge of the stage, folding her arms over her chest as she watched him work the room like a politician or a man trying desperately to make amends.
"You could have texted," Chantell told him as he tried to hand her a bear claw.
They were sitting together near the front row of the auditorium, entirely alone. The students had asked for a short break, giving them some much-needed space to talk.
"Sorry," Ian sighed, looking genuinely sheepish. "I've been super busy with the startup prep for London."
"So Susan got in touch, then?"
"Yes," Ian said, a faint flush creeping up his neck. "And I want to say sorry again for the other night. It wasn't fair to drag you into it."
"I said it's fine," Chantell replied, pulling her knees up toward her chest. "I just hate that I've been pulled into something I can't even fight."
"Well, on that note... the Pritchard Group is apparently buying up most of the surrounding buildings under the guise of redevelopment."
"Oh, how reassuring," she said dryly.
Ian smiled, but he knew the uncomfortable truth and so did Chantell.
"Well, according to Sebastian, her secretary," Ian said, taking a bite out of a bear claw so his voice was muffled, "it's been on the books for years."
"Like fuck it has!" Chantell stood up abruptly and began pacing the narrow aisle between the auditorium seats. "It doesn't matter now. I'm moving."
"Yes, but you shouldn't have to," Ian insisted, watching her with a troubled expression.
"Look, Ian." Chantell stopped in her tracks and turned to look at him, her defenses crumbling just enough for the pain to show. "This is your world, and as much as I... as much as I liked it, it wasn't me."
She sniffled, swallowing hard against the lump in her throat. "So even though we don't have a stand-in for the Judge yet, you don't have to keep showing up here. You don't have to do this."
"Why?" Ian asked softly, setting the rest of his pastry aside and looking straight at her.
"My students shouldn't have to suffer because of me and what I did," Chantell said, her voice dropping to a fragile whisper.
"You haven't done anything wrong, Chan."
"Then why does it feel like I have?" she asked, looking up at him with fresh tears glittering in her eyes.
---
Climber United hadn’t started in a boardroom; it had started in the backseat of a beat-up station wagon with two hundred eager subscribers and a box of film rolls.
Back in 2001, Maxine was a force of nature. Every single week, driven by a desperate, electric hunger to conquer something bigger than herself, she tackled every peak along the northern borders of the United States and up into Canada. Rain, snow, or brutal cold, it didn't matter if there was a summit, she was climbing it.
And Ian was right there beside her.
Armed with nothing more than a cheap, secondhand camera, they scaled frozen ridges and treacherous cliffs, carefully documenting every foothold and safe path up the mountainside. Ian took the photos, his eyes locked on Maxine through the lens, capturing her raw grit and absolute fearlessness.
When they finally came down off the mountains, bruised, exhausted, and buzzing from the adrenaline, they’d hole up in cheap motel rooms for days at a time. Naked under heavy blankets, surrounded by the sharp smell of freshly developed prints, they spent the week living on takeout and pure obsession. Ian would lay beside her, tracing the curve of her spine with one hand while she used the other to hand-sketch every page layout around his photos.
They didn't just build a magazine in those bed sheets they forged a shared madness. Every issue was written in sweat, ink, and skin-on-skin intimacy. It was violent, creative, and completely consuming, a wild flame that neither of them knew how to control until it inevitably burned them both to the ground.
Noe in Maxine’s high-rise office, amidst the polished steel and sleek mahogany, a large silver frame sat prominently on her desk. Inside the frame was her favorite picture in the world: a young Maxine Pritchard standing atop the snow-swept summit of Mount Logan, her face flushed with adrenaline, wind tearing at her jacket, and the vast expanse of the Yukon stretching out behind her.
It was one of the very first photographs Ian had taken with the new, upgraded camera they'd saved up for during those crazy, sun-drenched first months of Climber United. He had captured her at the very edge of the world, fearless and completely untouched by failure.
She kept it framed on display not out of sentimentality, but as a silent, daily reminder. It reminded her of where she’d started, who had helped build her, and exactly how far she was willing to go to conquer everything in her path.
---
Maxine sat in her office, staring at the photograph. The memory of the man who had refused to chase her still stung a dull ache in her chest that she had long since learned to ignore.
Six years ago, Nepal had been little more than a pipe dream. She had wanted to take Climber United America somewhere its readers wouldn't necessarily dare to go. Into the unknown. Beyond the familiar peaks and well-worn trails, into places most people would never dream of exploring.
She had spent days, then weeks, preparing planning routes, researching locations, organizing equipment, and working out how to bring the journey to their readers. She had been consumed by it, as she always was whenever a new challenge took hold.
Then came the scare.
One night with Ian, and suddenly all those ambitious plans seemed to hang in the balance. The pregnancy test had been positive. For a few bewildering days, she had truly believed she was going to have his child.
Then the doctor confirmed it had been a false alarm.
She still remembered the strange mixture of relief and disappointment that had followed. She’d told herself she was relieved, Nepal was waiting, the magazine needed her, and she had far too much ahead of her to stop now. But even six years later, she couldn't quite forget those few days, or the quiet future she had briefly imagined before it slipped away.
She had understood what Ian was going through back then.
How could she not?
His own business had been consuming him, demanding more of his time and energy than either of them had anticipated. Then his mother had died, leaving him to navigate his grief while sorting through her estate and everything that came with it. There were days when he barely seemed to have a moment to breathe.
Maxine had tried to be patient. She knew he was hurting, and she had never expected him to put his life on hold for her. She remembered watching him at his desk late into the night, paperwork spread before him, his face drawn with exhaustion. Sometimes she would sit beside him, resting a hand on his shoulder, and he would cover it with his own without looking up.
She’d understood. Truly, she had.
But understanding didn't make it hurt any less.
They had once done everything together. They’d built the magazine from practically nothing, traveled the world, and shared the kind of wild excitement that made ordinary life seem dull by comparison. Somewhere along the way, though, she’d begun to feel as if she were waiting for him to finish living his life so they could finally get back to theirs.
She couldn't tell whether that feeling was selfish or simply the truth.
She had wanted him to notice. To look up from his work, put the paperwork aside, and tell her that, whatever else was happening, she still mattered to him.
Instead, she had kept making plans. Nepal had become more than just another expedition it was a chance to do something extraordinary, to remind herself that she was still moving forward and some small, stubborn part of her had desperately wanted Ian to ask her to stay.
Not because she needed his permission.
Not because she wanted him to abandon his responsibilities.
She had just wanted him to give her a reason to believe that their future mattered to him as much as it mattered to her.
He never did.
So she had left, carrying all the unspoken hurt she had never quite managed to put into words.
---
She stared at the latest issue of Climber United. The glossy cover featured one of the climbing scene's hot new prodigies, his confident face staring right back at her.
She snatched the magazine off her desk and hurled it across the room. It slammed against the opposite wall with a heavy thud, pages fluttering as it dropped to the floor.
It wasn't a bad issue. The photography was spectacular, the writing was sharp, and the circulation figures were climbing steadily. By every business metric that mattered, things were going exceptionally well.
But the frustration she'd felt at the gala watching Ian with that redhead on his arm still sat like lead in her chest.
She'd gone back to their shared apartment once, foolishly hoping to find him there. Instead, she had walked into an empty home and suffocating silence. No note. No text. Not even a letter left on the counter.
Nothing.
He'd simply vanished.
She'd had to pull every thread in her extensive network of connections just to track him down and find out what he was doing. And there he was—standing beneath the glittering chandeliers of a gala, looking entirely at ease with a striking redhead on his arm, chatting up Susan Ratchett as though he hadn't left Maxine to pick up the fractured pieces of their life together.
The fucking nerve.
Of course Ian had moved on. Six years had passed. What had she expected? That he'd spend the rest of his life mourning a relationship neither of them had known how to save?
She knew better than that.
But knowing something theoretically and watching it unfold with her own eyes were two very different things.
The sight had left her with a deep, foul bitterness she couldn't swallow down. Ian looked happy. Worse, he looked comfortable—as though he'd slid into a life beside someone else without giving his past a second thought.
And Maxine had never been particularly good at accepting that someone else had something she wanted.
Revenge, she decided, would have to be surgical. No tantrums, no dramatic public confrontations, no giving Ian the satisfaction of knowing he'd gotten under her skin. She would approach this like a predator stalking prey: patient, deliberate, waiting for the precise moment to strike.
First, she'd had Sebastian look into Ian's routine and movements. When the redhead appeared beside him, it hadn't taken long to dig up her identity.
Chantell Lovelace. Twenty-five. A high school drama teacher.
Maxine stared down at the file on her computer screen.
A teacher?
Of all the women Ian Jenkins could have chosen, he'd ended up with a high school drama teacher.
She almost laughed aloud. He'd built multi-million-dollar businesses, traveled the globe, and once shared a bed with a woman who scaled peaks most people wouldn't dare dream of. And now he was parading around town with someone whose entire existence revolved around school rehearsals and teenage theater drama.
It shouldn't have bothered her.
It certainly shouldn't have mattered.
Yet the image of Ian's hand resting possessively on Chantell's waist at the gala burned behind her eyelids, along with the casual intimacy of how he'd leaned in toward her.
Maxine's expression hardened into cold, unyielding iron.
Whatever Ian thought he was doing, she wasn't about to stand aside and watch him build a domestic fairy tale as though their past had meant nothing and Chantell Lovelace, whether she knew it or not, had just become the primary piece in a game she wasn't equipped to play.
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