Renee should’ve known the night was cursed the moment the champagne in her hand went flat.
But fate didn’t just nudge—
it strutted straight into the gallery wearing a tailored charcoal suit and a smile he’d perfected by breaking her first.
Owen Hale.
He walked in like the room existed for his arrival, like the art on the walls bowed to him the way she once had. Light from the track lamps caught the sharp angles of his face, the familiar tilt of his smirk—
a smirk that used to say come here,
and now said you’ll never outrun me.
Renee’s stomach clenched before her brain could decide why.
Her body still remembered him.
The warmth of his hands.
The lies.
The night he put a ring on her finger in an attic lit by takeout boxes and hope she should’ve never trusted.
She set her glass down on a pedestal—almost knocking over the sculpture perched on it—because her fingers had started trembling. She forced herself to breathe. This was her night. Her exhibition. Her comeback. Her life rebuilt from scraps.
And yet he walked in and suddenly it all felt like borrowed light.
He hadn’t seen her yet.
Thank God.
Or maybe God hated her—hard to tell these days.
Guests drifted around her like soft currents, murmuring about brushstrokes and symbolism and “potential.” Renee barely heard any of it. The moment her eyes landed on Owen, the gallery shrank to a single point, a single memory, a single unfinished sentence between them.
Then—
He lifted his head.
His gaze cut through the crowd, clean as a blade, and found her.
A flicker.
Recognition.
Possession.
Something darker behind it.
Renee’s pulse stumbled.
He started walking toward her, slow, deliberate, like he was crossing a battlefield he thought he still owned.
“Renee,” he said, voice low enough to curl into her bones. “You look… exactly the same.”
She forced a smile that tasted like iron.
“You don’t.”
His brows lifted, amused—as if she hadn’t spent three years crawling out of the mess he left her in.
“Still painting storms?” he asked, eyes sweeping the room like he expected to find himself hidden in every canvas. “Still running from things that aren’t chasing you?”
She stepped back, spine hitting the corner of a display wall.
“And you’re still showing up where you’re not invited.”
A soft, dangerous laugh.
“Come on, Renee. You didn’t think I’d miss your grand return, did you?”
She looked him dead in the eyes.
“Actually? Yes. That’s exactly what I thought.”
Because the truth was simple:
She’d built this life on the assumption that he’d stay gone.
She’d stitched herself together on the belief that ghosts don’t return in Italian suits and cologne that once lived on her pillow.
But Owen was here.
In her gallery.
In her night.
In the one place she finally felt like she could breathe again.
And as he stepped closer—her heartbeat stuttering like it wanted out—Renee realized something chilling and undeniable:
Nothing in her life was safe again.