Guarded Hearts
by PageCrave Editorial
Three kidnapping attempts in fourteen months. That is the file on Ivan Xue, the thirty-three-year-old heir of Xueheng Technologies, keeper of the Meridian chip architecture his dead father spent ten years drawing, and — as of his board's latest emergency session — the most expensive problem a protection firm in Binhai has ever been asked to price.
Enter Sable Jiang: thirty, ex-military-police, currently the best close-protection specialist Copperline Risk Group has and the worst at pretending otherwise. Her contract is one page and one hundred eighty days long. Its clause one is shorter than her name: the assigned detail shall not become involved with the principal. Any personal relationship ends the contract on the spot, with liability attached. She has read the clause out loud to herself on hard nights the way other people read scripture.
She starts the job by taking a bomb apart on the tower steps in four minutes flat — a fan's gift crate of white lilies that is nothing of the kind — and her new principal watches the whole strip-down from a doorway, timing her with his watch. His verdict, delivered like a contract rider: when she disarms a bomb, she is not allowed to frown. It is the first clause he adds to her life. It will not be the last.
The brief was supposed to be simple: stand within arm's reach and never touch. Instead there are body-scan rituals that run ninety seconds and feel like negotiations. Seatbelt reaches across a silent car. A wire check at a gala with her knuckles at his collar and his eyes in the mirror. A shoulder wound he dresses under her instruction, and the heavier armor plate she orders the next day because the seam taught her a lesson. And the clause, quoted back and forth like a taut wire between two people who keep almost leaning on it: clause one, clause one, clause one.
Because someone is selling him. The rotation calendar leaks. A route she has written nowhere but her own red notebook comes back to her as an ambush. A ghost badge named 7311 wanders the building at night with good study habits. A broker with a phone that never rings offers her two million for the schedule and compliments her competence like a threat. Every answer Sable pulls from the paper points one floor up — toward the uncle with the warmest smile in the company, the man who pours tea like a host and reads files like an auditor, the vice chairman who keeps insisting that family eats first.
The strategy session is being moved off-tower. The board seal will be on the table. The heir will wear his father's token into a room with four service doors — and an official walk-through that counts six. And the woman the contract suspended — the one detail they couldn't price — is expected to walk in alone, because that was the plan all along.
One hundred eighty days. One clause. Two people doing arithmetic that refuses to close.
Guarded Hearts: a close-protection romance about the most dangerous distance in the world — arm's reach.
In our reading guide: The terms were clear. Nobody followed them.
