CHAPTER 2 — THE PRICE OF LOST LOVE (TRISTAN)

The world around me narrowed to that single point: her. Aurora. Standing like a marble statue, trying to maintain her composure, but I could see the crack in her ice. I could see the rapid pulse beating beneath that ridiculous gold bracelet my father had forced onto her wrist. A collar. That’s what it was.

When the old man was pulled away by his lackeys, it was as if a force field had dissipated. The air changed. And I moved.

I didn’t walk toward her. Closing the distance between us was an act of pure predation. A silent glide through the crowd until her scent — a sweet jasmine mixed with something uniquely Aurora — hit my nostrils, canceling out all the other expensive perfumes in the room.

“Seven years…” The words left me like a growl. It was a fact. A condemnation. Seven years since I destroyed her to save her. Seven years carrying the weight of the look she gave me after the drink spilled down my face.

“And you still know how to ruin a party.” Her voice was firmer than I expected, but I heard the subtle tremor beneath it. The anger. Anger was good. It was alive. It was the hatred I preferred over the emptiness I feared I had left inside her.

A fierce impulse ran through my blood. My hand moved on its own, hovering over her wrist, over the bracelet. My fingers, which never trembled on the battlefield, were unsteady. The physical contradiction of my own existence in front of her. The beast chained by its own heart.

“This piece of trash…” I spat the words, the contempt for the object, for the man who gave it to her, so thick it almost had a taste. “It doesn’t belong to you.”

“Nothing here belongs to me. I learned that the hard way.”

The pain in her voice was a direct blow to my chest. She was right. I had taught her that lesson in the cruelest way possible. The memory of my eighteenth birthday party invaded my mind with the force of a grenade.

The stage. The microphone. The need to hurt her publicly to protect her from my father.

And her look. It wasn’t just humiliation. It was betrayal. It was the end of a world. And then, the glass of whiskey. The amber liquid hitting my face, and the words she spat, cutting deeper than any blade:

“You proved you’re your father’s son, down to your soul.”

She was right that day. And I, like the coward I was, let her believe it. I let her hate me, because it was easier for her to survive the hell I was about to leave behind.

But now I was back. And the hatred in her eyes was tempered with something else. Something I could feel in the air between us, as electric and dangerous as it had always been.

Desire. The magnetic attraction that neither time, nor pain, nor a forced marriage had managed to extinguish.

“You’re wrong.” My voice came out harsher, the Löwe rising to the surface — the beast that only she could tame. My second nature. “You’ve always belonged to me.”

My eyes traveled over her face, the lips I remembered tasting, the line of her neck where I used to whisper forbidden secrets. The hunger was a physical pain. I stretched out a finger and touched the bracelet. The gold was cold, but the skin beneath it was on fire. She shivered.

“He puts you in a display case, Aurora. Uses you as an ornament. But I… I remember the clay on your knees. The taste of your sweat on my tongue. The sound you make when you come for me.”

The blush that rose up her neck was my reward. It was the raw, naked truth between us. While my father treated her like a trophy, I knew her in her most wild and real essence.

“Shut up,” she whispered, but it was a weak plea. An echo of the past.

“No.” I refused, the growl stronger. I wasn’t here to play by her rules or my father’s. “You’re going to listen. You’re going to remember.”

Let my gaze finish what my words started.

“Remember every touch. Every moan. Every time you called me yours.”

I saw her moisten her lips, an involuntary act that told me everything I needed to know. The war wasn’t between me and my father. It was for her soul. And I had no intention of losing.

“His game is over, Meine süße perle (my sweet pearl). And mine is only just beginning.”

I turned and walked away before she could answer, before I could give in to the impulse to throw her over my shoulder and carry her away from that prison right then and there.

Every step I took was a step toward my final goal: Destroy Cassius. And claim what had always been mine.

The path ahead would be dangerous. I would have to pretend, manipulate, maybe even hurt her again. But in the end, when the dust settled, she would understand. She had to understand.

Because the alternative — a life without her — was not an option. It was that simple.