PROLOGUE

      “HE MIGHT DIE any minute of any day or he might live to be a hundred. There’s nothing to be done for it.”

      Nathaniel Ramirez looked up at the snowy, whitecapped mountain peak and gulped in a big breath. The words he had overheard the cardiologist say to his mother all those years ago reverberated inside his skull. The cold air blasted through his throat, his lungs expanding greedily.

      Would this be the day?

      He raised his face to the sky as his vision cleared and his heart resumed its normal beat.

      At some point during the trek, he had realized he couldn’t finish the climb today.

      He didn’t know whether it was because, after almost twelve years of courting death, he was finally bored of playing hide-and-seek with it, or because he was just plain tired today.

      For a decade, he had been on a constant go across the world, without planting roots anywhere, without returning home, making real estate deals in corners of the world, making millions.

      An image of the roses in the garden his mother had loved, back in California, their color vividly red, the petals so soft that she had banned him from touching them, flashed across his mind’s eye.

      A stab of homesickness pierced him as he followed the icy path down. Sweat drenched him as he reached the wooden cabin he had been living in since he closed the Demakis deal in Greece six months ago. Restlessness slithered under his skin.

      And he knew what it meant. It meant he was thrashing against the cage he had made for himself; it meant he was getting lonely; thousands of years of human nature were urging him toward making a home, to seek companionship.

      He needed to chase a new challenge, whether clinching a real estate deal or conquering a new corner of the world he hadn’t stamped with his name yet. Fortunately for him, the world was vast and the challenges it presented numerous.

       Because staying still in one place was the one thing that made him weak, that made him long for more than he could have.

      * * *

      He’d just stepped out of a hot shower when his satellite phone beeped. Only a handful of people could reach him via this number. He pushed a hand through his overlong hair and checked the caller ID.

      The name flashing on the screen brought an instant smile to his face.

      He connected the call, and the sound of their old housekeeper Maria’s voice coming down the line filled him with a warmth he had missed for too long. Maria had been his rock after his mom passed.

      Suddenly he realized he missed a lot of things from home. He clamped down on the useless yearning before it morphed into the one thing he despised.

       Fear.

      “Nathan?”

      “Maria, how are you?”

      He smiled as Maria called him a few names in Spanish and then asked after him as if he were still a little boy.

      “You need to come home, Nathan. Your father... It’s been too long since you’ve seen each other.”

      The last time Nate saw him, his father had been the epitome of a selfish bastard instead of a grieving husband or a comforting father. And despite the decade and the thousands of miles that Nathan had put between them, the bitterness, the anger he felt for him was just as fresh as ever.

      Maybe there was no running away from a few things in life.

      “Is he ill again, Maria?”

      “No. He recovered from the pneumonia. They, at least that woman’s daughter, she took good care of him.”

      Praise from Maria, especially for that woman’s daughter, as she put it, meant Jackie’s daughter had slaved to take care of his dad.

      Nathan frowned, the memory of the one time he had seen his father’s mistress’s daughter leaving a sour taste in his mouth. She had been kind even then.

      That day in the garage, with the August sun shining gloriously outside with blatant disregard to the fact that Nathan’s entire world had crumbled around him. There had been blooms everywhere, the gardeners keeping it up for his mother even though she had stopped venturing into the garden for months.

      The grief that his mother was gone, the chilling fear, the cold fist in his chest that