Chapter 7: An Unexpected Tableau

“What the fuck?” I asked, still looking at him.

The words came out before I could dress them up in politeness. My father sat across from me, his vodka untouched on the glass table between us, and I realized I’d been waiting for something—an explanation, an apology, a single fucking acknowledgment that tonight had gone sideways in ways I hadn’t anticipated. He gave me none of those things.

He sighed, deep and weary, and rose from his seat. The couch cushions released him with a soft exhale. He walked to the desk, his footsteps muffled by the Persian rug, and lowered himself into the leather chair behind it like he was settling into a throne he’d worn smooth with years of occupation.

“You still have a lot of things to do, Lucian,” he said, his voice carrying that practiced calmness I remembered from childhood. “Go rest. You need it.”

He was already reaching for a folder on his desk, already dismissing me even when he knows, I hadn’t even gotten what I came for.

All of this felt unbelievable.

Why was everything happening to me now, tonight, in this house that no longer fit the shape of my memories?

The walls had been painted. The furniture had been replaced. The boy I’d left behind had grown into something that looked at me like I was the one who needed to prove himself.

“Take a hot bath and come downstairs,” my father added, already scanning whatever document had captured his attention. “We should have dinner together.”

I scoffed. The sound escaped before I could catch it, and I didn’t try to hide the edge in it.

Dinner?

He wanted to have dinner, after leaving me to cool my heels in a lounge for God knew how long, after sending his trophy to greet me at the door like some kind of twisted butler, after letting me wander into his study confused and angry and hungry for answers he clearly had no intention of giving.

I turned toward the door, my hand already reaching for the handle, when a thought stopped me cold.

“Where’s Victoria?” I asked, turning back to look at him.

The question landed in the room like a stone dropped into deep water. My father’s eyes twitched at the corner as something flickered behind that mask. Something he didn’t want me to see.

“She went on a vacation,” he replied without looking up.

His pen moved across the paper in steady strokes. The scratch of it was the only sound in the room.

“Oh.” I paused, letting the syllable hang between us. “I just hope things are cool with you both.”

I muttered the last part, more to myself than to him, and pulled the door closed behind me before he could respond.

Victoria. My father’s wife, though I’d stopped trying to define their relationship years ago. She wasn’t quite a wife in the traditional sense—there was no warmth between them, no easy intimacy, none of the small touches and shared glances that married people accumulated like loose change. She was more of a fixture and a presence that occupied space in the penthouse without ever filling it. I’d learned not to ask questions about her, because the answers were always vague.

I leaned against the wall in the corridor, letting the cool surface press against my back. My father hadn’t changed. That was the conclusion I kept circling back to, the anchor point in a sea of uncertainty. He was still the same man who’d raised me in his image, still the same man who’d sent me away for a decade and expected me to return grateful for the education. It was me who’d changed, or maybe it was just that I hadn’t readjusted to the gravity of this place yet.

And things were changing fast. Faster than I could track. I didn’t think I wanted to change with them.

I pushed off from the wall and started walking, my footsteps echoing in the empty hallway. The corridor stretched ahead of me, lined with doors that looked identical, their brass handles gleaming under the soft lighting. I’d been in this house for less than an hour and I was already lost. The renovations had scrambled my internal map, replacing familiar landmarks with strangers I didn’t recognize. The gray and butter-yellow walls I’d grown up with were gone, replaced by deep blues and crisp whites that belonged to someone else’s childhood.

And that smug-faced Ceal wasn’t here either. He’d probably disappeared into whatever corner of the house he inhabited, arranging his funeral flowers and rehearsing his next performance.

Good, because I didn’t want to see his goddamn face in my face anymore. The memory of his grip on my wrist, the cold pressure of his fingers, the flash of red in his eyes—I pushed it down, shoved it into the same locked box where I kept everything I didn’t want to examine too closely.

Where the fuck was Daniel?

He should have been here at this door, guide me to my quarter, but he wasn’t here. Maybe he had lost in his way here too.

“Oh my God,” I gasped, the sound loud in the stillness. “All of this shit is exhausting.”

I stopped walking and pressed the heels of my palms against my eyes until colors bloomed behind my eyelids. My legs ached from the flight. My shoulders were knotted with tension. My head pounded with the rhythm of a pulse that wouldn’t slow down. I could have called Daniel for help, could have pulled out my phone and summoned him with a single text, but my pride was bigger than my height and my height wasn’t small.

So I kept walking. Blindly. Through hallways that all looked the same, past doors that offered no clues, my feet carrying me deeper into the penthouse without any clear destination in mind.

And strangely, I hadn’t seen any guards or maids passing through.

No security patrols or housekeepers with their carts of fresh linens. Where the fuck were they all, and why were they so useless at the same time? A house this size should have been crawling with staff, especially tonight, with the heir returning after a decade abroad. Unless it was a restricted area. Unless everyone had been told to stay out of certain zones, and I’d wandered into one of them without realizing it.

“Fuck,” I muttered, making another turn.

This corridor looked different. It was taller, wider, framed in dark wood that had been carved with patterns I couldn’t quite make out from this distance. It looked important.

My curiosity stirred, sluggish but persistent. Is this a safe room, maybe. A vault where important documents were kept. Or some kind of royalty in there, some private space my father had built while I was away, another piece of the house that had changed without my knowledge.

“Ain’t no royalty but me in this house,” I corrected aloud, and the words felt good in my mouth.

I pushed the door open.

The room beyond was a seating area, complex and sprawling, with furniture arranged in clusters that suggested multiple conversations happening at once.

But that wasn’t what caught my attention.

What caught my attention was the couch. And the two figures on it.

Ceal sat at one end, his posture relaxed, his jacket draped over the armrest beside him. His sleeves were rolled to his elbows, exposing forearms I hadn’t noticed before—lean but defined, the kind of arms that came from work rather than a gym. His head was tilted slightly, his expression unreadable, his dark eyes fixed on the woman beside him.

She was young. That was the first thing I registered. Young and pretty, with dark hair that fell past her shoulders and a maid’s uniform that had been partially unbuttoned. The fabric hung open at her collar, revealing the curve of her throat and the hollow at the base of her neck. She was sitting close to him, close enough that their thighs nearly touched, and her hand rested on his knee with an intimacy that suggested this wasn’t their first time in this position.

Half-naked. She was half-naked on the couch with Ceal.

The sight hit me like a punch to the chest, it was unexpected. I stood in the doorway, frozen, my hand still on the handle, and I watched the scene unfold in front of me like a tableau I’d stumbled into by accident.

Ceal looked up.

His eyes met mine, and for a long moment, neither of us moved. The woman beside him followed his gaze, her expression shifting from surprise to something closer to alarm as she registered who was standing in the doorway. She scrambled to button her uniform, her fingers fumbling with the small plastic discs, her cheeks flushing a deep, mortified red.

But Ceal didn’t flinch or scramble. Didn’t do anything to suggest he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t have been doing.

He simply looked at me, his gaze steady.

The silence stretched between us, thick and charged, and I felt something twist in my chest, but it don't have a name for it yet.

“Am I interrupting something?” I heard myself say, and my voice came out rougher than I’d intended.