Chapter 11: The Blood on the Silk

Vespera

The grand hallway of the Bayerischer Hof was strangely quiet. The silence felt wrong, like something bad was about to happen.

Kasimir’s hand gripped my elbow tightly as he walked fast, forcing me to hurry to keep up with him. He didn’t even look at me. His face was hard, and his jaw was so tight that I could see the muscle twitching under his pale skin.

Behind us, the soft sound of classical music and people laughing drifted through the ballroom doors. The sounds grew quieter as we moved toward the large glass entrance that led outside.

"You're squeezing too hard," I muttered through gritted teeth, trying to haul my arm back.

"Walk, Vespera," he said, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly rasp that scraped against my nerves. He didn't loosen his grip by a fraction. "We are leaving. Now."

"Because Soren spoke to me? Because he breathed the same air as your precious contract?" A bitter laugh escaped my throat, though my heart was hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. "You drag me here like a trophy, parade me in front of Munich’s elite to show them the Falkenrath name is officially owned by Adler Global, and the moment someone asks me a simple question, you lose your mind."

He stopped dead in his tracks, pulling me so close that the crisp, heavy wool of his tuxedo jacket brushed against the bare skin above my sweetheart neckline. The scent of his expensive cedar, dark amber, and the faint, bitter edge of faint tobacco flooded my senses, thick and suffocating.

Kasimir leaned down, his mismatched eyes sweeping over my face with a terrifying, icy intensity.

"Soren Lindner does not ask 'simple questions,' Vespera," he whispered, each word precise and laced with venom. "He measures the neck of every person I care to stand beside, calculating exactly how hard he needs to pull the rope to break it. You know nothing of the blood between our families. You are here to sign documents and keep your sister breathing. Nothing more."

The words hit me like a slap to the face. The coldness. The pure, unadulterated calculation. For weeks, in the quiet, shadowed corridors of Alpine Ridge, I had let myself foolishly believe that the occasional soft touch, the lingering gazes over late-night ledgers, meant something human was thawed inside him.

I was wrong. I was just an asset in a velvet dress.

"Then let go of me," I said, my voice dropping into a razor-thin whisper, though my eyes burned with unshed tears of absolute fury. "If I am just ink on a page to you, don't touch me."

Kasimir’s hazel eyes flickered, something dark and unreadable flashing behind his pupils. His chest rose and fell in a slow, deliberate breath, but before he could answer, the double glass doors at the end of the foyer slid open.

The crisp, freezing Bavarian air hit us instantly, cutting through the suffocating heat of the corridor. Outside, parked directly at the base of the marble steps, sat his armored Mercedes Maybach, its blacked-out windows reflecting the harsh streetlights of the rain-slicked Munich avenue. Jonas stood by the open rear door, his hand resting casually inside his jacket, his eyes scanning the quiet street with the practiced paranoia of a career bodyguard.

"Car is secure, Herr Adler," Jonas said quietly into his collar mic as we stepped across the threshold onto the cold stone steps.

I pulled my arm away from Kasimir's grip, shivering as the damp night air wrapped around my bare shoulders. The heavy emerald silk of my gown rustled around my heels, heavy and cumbersome. I wanted nothing more than to get into that car, pull the privacy screen up, and put a million miles between myself and the cold man beside me.

I took a step down the marble stairs.

It wasn’t a sound or a movement.

I noticed something for just a split second in the rain-covered glass of the tall building across the road. A dark shape stood against the sky, and a tiny red light reflected off the wet glass near the Maybach’s passenger door.

It wasn't aiming for the car. The tiny dot shifted, jumping from the black steel of the vehicle, up the marble steps, and centering directly over the left side of Kasimir’s chest.

My blood turned to pure ice in my veins.

He doesn't see it.

Kasimir was looking down at his phone, his thumb hovering over the screen, his shoulder completely turned toward the street. He was completely open. Completely exposed.

There was no time to yell. No time to scream his name or explain the sudden, terrifying instinct that hijacked my body.

I didn't think about the contract. I didn't think about his cold words from two seconds ago, or the way he had just crushed my dignity under his expensive leather shoes. All I knew, with a violent, sickening certainty, was that if that bullet landed, the man standing beside me would die right in front of my eyes.

I threw my weight violently into his side.

"Kasimir!"

My hands shoved against his broad chest with every ounce of strength I possessed. He was caught completely off-balance, his heavy frame shifting heavily to the right just as a sound like a cracked whip split the night air.

THWACK.

It wasn't a roar; it was a high-velocity, suppressed hiss that punched through the air right where Kasimir’s head had been a millisecond prior.

An agonizing, white-hot line of absolute fire sliced across the skin just below my left collarbone. It felt as though someone had dragged a red-hot iron rod directly across my flesh. The force of the projectile's slipstream ripped the delicate silk strap of my gown clean off my shoulder.

My breath slammed out of my lungs in a ragged gasp. My legs folded beneath me, the world spinning in a nauseating blur of black sky, wet marble, and flashing streetlights.

"Vespera!"

The coldness in his voice vanished. It wasn't the voice of the Iron Chancellor. It was the raw, primal roar of a beast watching its world catch fire.

Before I could hit the hard stone steps, Kasimir caught me. His massive arm wrapped around my waist with terrifying strength, hauling my falling body hard against his chest. He didn't just catch me; he spun his entire body around mine, throwing himself over me as we hit the marble landing together.

He used his broad frame as a human shield, completely burying my torso beneath his own, his body heavy, warm, and trembling violently against mine.

THWACK.

A second shot struck the stone step six inches from my head, spraying sharp shards of marble dust into the air.

"SNIPER! ROOFTOP SOUTH!" Jonas screamed, his weapon drawn and firing blindly toward the high-rise across the street as he threw his body in front of the Maybach’s open door. "GET THEM IN THE CAR! NOW!"

Kasimir didn't wait for his men.

He gathered me into his arms, lifting me clean off the ground as if I weighed nothing at all. He scrambled backward into the rear footwell of the Maybach, pulling me down onto the floorboards beneath him as Jonas slammed the heavy, armored door shut.

The heavy, soundproof seals of the vehicle locked with a dead metallic thud, cutting off the immediate chaos of the street outside.

The interior of the car was dark, lit only by the ambient red glow of the dashboard lights.

Kasimir was hovering over me, his chest heaving in shallow, desperate ragged breaths. His hands were usually so deliberate, so impossibly still were shaking uncontrollably as they scrambled over my neck, my face, my shoulders.

"Vespera. Vespera, look at me!" he rasped, his voice breaking a sound I had never heard from him, a sound of absolute, terrifying panic. His hazel eye were wide, unhinged, searching my face with a desperate, manic intensity. "Where are you hit? Talk to me! God damn it, Vespera, open your eyes!"

"I'm... I'm breathing," I choked out, my voice barely a whisper as tears of pure shock leaked from the corners of my eyes. Pain was throbbing wildly across my collarbone, a deep, burning heat that made every shallow breath feel like inhaling broken glass.

His eyes tracked down to my chest, and a low, terrifying sound escaped the back of his throat.

My emerald dress was soaked. A dark, thick stain was blooming rapidly across the green silk, spreading toward my ribs, wet and heavy against my skin.

Kasimir pressed his bare hand directly over the wound, applying hard, desperate pressure. I gasped at the sudden, sharp spike of agony, my fingers instinctively digging into the lapels of his tuxedo jacket, clutching him for dear life.

"Hold on. Just hold on, liebling," he murmured, his voice dropping into a rough, trembling whisper as he leaned down. His forehead pressed against mine, his hot, shallow breath brushing across my trembling lips. His palm was covered in my warm, fresh blood, sticking to his skin, but he didn't care. He pressed harder, his whole frame shivering with a dark, lethal rage that vibrated through his very bones.

"Who did this?" I whispered, my vision swimming with dark spots as the adrenaline began to bleed out of my system, leaving only cold, terrifying exhaustion.

Kasimir lifted his head slightly. The panic in his eyes was slowly hardening into something far worse something cold, ancient, and completely devoid of mercy.

"It doesn't matter who sent them," he whispered, his thumb lightly brushing a tear from my cheek, leaving a smear of dark crimson across my skin. "Because I am going to tear their world apart piece by piece."

Suddenly, the heavy Maybach violently lurched forward as Jonas hit the accelerator, the tires screeching against the wet pavement.

Then, a loud, metallic CLANG echoed through the undercarriage of the car.

The vehicle lurched sideways, the engine giving a sickening, choked whine as the steering locked up completely. Through the front windshield, I watched in helpless horror as the driver's side window of a heavy black SUV smashed directly into ours, forcing our car off the road.

The Maybach slammed heavily into the concrete wall of the underpass, the airbags deploying with a deafening bang.

In the sudden, suffocating darkness that followed, the faint, electronic beep of a magnetic timer began to echo from somewhere directly beneath my seat.