INSIDE THE DRAGON'S LAIR

Aria's eyes opened slowly, like they were being pried apart against her will. The last thing she remembered was rain and headlights and the taste of copper in her mouth. Now there was no rain at all. Only warmth, and the smell of sandalwood, and something underneath it like cedar wood left out in the sun.

She wasn't lying on wet asphalt. She was sinking into a mattress so soft it felt like it might swallow her whole.

She sat up fast, too fast, and the room tilted sideways for a second before settling. Her stage dress was gone. In its place was a black silk robe, cool and heavy against her bare skin, the kind of fabric that had never once touched a body like hers.

"Vitals are stable, but her adrenaline is still spiking." The voice was close, and shaking.

Aria turned her head and found three people standing beside the bed in white medical coats, sweat shining on their foreheads, hands trembling around equipment she didn't recognize. Not one of them met her eyes.

This was not a hospital.

The room stretched out around her, huge and cold and beautiful in a way that felt wrong, like something built to be admired rather than lived in. Floor to ceiling windows ran along one wall, and beyond the glass a storm tore across black water, waves smashing themselves against cliffs far below. Dark marble. Heavy velvet curtains. A bed with black silk sheets big enough to sleep four people and still feel empty.

"Where am I?" Her voice came out cracked and small. "Where's my mother?"

The doors opened before anyone answered her.

All three doctors dropped their eyes to the floor at once, like something in the room had just changed and their bodies knew it before their minds did.

He walked in.

Valen Vance. Or whatever his real name was. In this light he looked less like a man who ran the city's underworld and more like something carved out of marble and given a pulse. He'd taken off the coat stained with someone else's blood. His shirt was black, unbuttoned at the collar, and his hair still held the shape of the storm outside, damp and dark against his forehead.

It was his eyes that stopped her breath. They weren't brown anymore. They burned red, low and steady, like coals someone had forgotten to put out.

"Leave us." His voice moved through the floor before it reached her ears.

"Sir, we haven't finished the scan," one doctor started.

He didn't raise his voice. He simply looked at the man, and the red in his eyes swirled once, slow, like something stirring at the bottom of a well. "You're finished. Pack your things. Walk out of this house and forget you were ever in it. You went to a conference tonight. Nothing more."

The doctor's face went slack. His eyes emptied out, pupils blown wide and blank.

"Yes, Mr. Vance."

Aria watched, frozen, as all three of them packed up in perfect silence and filed out like sleepwalkers, the heavy doors clicking shut behind them.

He erased their memories. Just like that. Like flipping a switch.

She scrambled backward until her spine hit the headboard, pulling the robe tight around her throat with both hands, staring at him the way you'd stare at something that had crawled up out of the water where nothing should be able to live.

"What are you?" The words shook coming out.

She'd heard the stories, everyone in the city had. That Valen Vance never aged. That people who crossed him simply stopped existing, no bodies, no funerals, no explanations. She'd always assumed that was the kind of thing frightened people said about frightening men.

Looking at him now, at the unnatural stillness of his shoulders and the sharp white edge of a fang against his lower lip, she understood she'd had it wrong. He wasn't a frightening man.

He wasn't a man at all.

He crossed the room without hurry and sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress barely dipped under his weight, like gravity worked differently for him than it did for her. He studied her face the way a scientist studies something under glass, curious, careful, entirely without warmth.

Then he tossed a folder into her lap. Heavy. Leather. Smeared at the corners with blood that hadn't fully dried.

Her hands trembled as she looked down. Through the plastic sleeve she could make out an official seal, and beneath it, her father's name. The deed to the studio.

"Your boyfriend sold this to the Navarro family for pennies on the dollar," he said, tracing one finger slowly along his own jaw. "He was hoping their men would deal with you permanently and let him keep the payout clean."

Her chest caved in. "You took it back?"

"I don't take things, little bird." His mouth curved, but nothing about it looked like a smile. "I finish them. While you were unconscious, I spent three hours removing every man in the Navarro organization who had a hand in tonight. They won't be found. The tide will see to that."

He leaned in, and the air around him seemed to grow heavier, pressing down on her chest like something physical.

"The studio isn't his anymore. It isn't theirs either. It's mine now."

Before she could even begin to understand what he'd just told her, casually, like he was describing dinner, he set a second paper on the bed. A billing statement from San Cristóbal General. At the bottom, stamped in green: PAID IN FULL BY VANCE ENTERPRISES. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

Her heart stopped working for a second.

"Why," she whispered, looking up at him. "Why would you pay for her?"

"I don't give gifts." His hand moved, slow and deliberate, and closed cold fingers around her ankle through the silk sheet. The room seemed to drop ten degrees where he touched her. "I buy leverage. I own the studio your father built. I just bought the machine keeping your mother's heart running. That means I own her life too, Aria. Whether or not either of you likes the arithmetic."

Anger and grief collided in her chest until she couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. Tears spilled hot down her face. "What do you want from me? If you're going to kill me, do it. Stop playing games."

He stood, and his shadow swallowed the space above her. He planted one hand on the headboard beside her ear and leaned down until the scent of sandalwood was the only thing in the world.

"Your boyfriend sold your father's legacy for scraps," he murmured, and his voice had gone low and slow, the way a predator's does right before it stops pretending to be patient. "Now I'm going to buy something worth infinitely more."

He reached into his shirt pocket and produced a silver pen and a document bordered in black.

"You'll sign this. Two conditions, and they don't bend. First, when we're alone, you belong to me. You sing when I ask, as often as I ask, for as long as I need it. Second, in public, you wear my ring and play my devoted fiancée for every camera and every rival who wants to know why the ghost of this city finally settled down."

He tapped the watch on his wrist without breaking her stare, and the crimson in his eyes deepened into something molten.

"Refuse, and I make one phone call. Your mother's machines go dark in exactly ten minutes."