FIFTEEN

The sun rose gently over Castell Mansion, its light scattering across glass walls and marble floors like a thousand unkept promises. In the breakfast room, Hazel sat before a table set for royalty, silver cutlery, freshly cut fruit, and black coffee steaming in its porcelain cup.

The reports lay open beside her plate, a cascade of figures and projections from Castell Industries. Her eyes followed them with precision, but her hand trembled once, a soft, almost imperceptible flutter. She steadied it before the movement could exist long enough to be noticed.

Control, after all, was her only form of prayer.

Dimitri entered moments later, his footsteps quiet against the marble. No arrogance today. No performance. Just a man who didn’t quite know what to do with sincerity.

“You handled the press beautifully last night,” he said, pouring his own coffee. “They couldn’t stop talking about you. Even the board was impressed.”

Hazel didn’t look up. “Then I suppose the illusion served its purpose.”

He gave a small smile. “You make it sound like we’re ghosts pretending to be alive.”

She turned a page, her voice soft but edged with thought. “Aren’t we?”

For a long moment, neither spoke. Dimitri stirred his coffee absently, the spoon clinking once, twice, before he set it down.

Her phone vibrated. A message. Another one.

She glanced at the screen, no name, no subject line, and without hesitation, she deleted it. The gesture was quiet, deliberate.

Control wasn’t silence. It was choosing what not to see.

They met for lunch later that day, not in the city’s gilded hotels or polished penthouses, but in a quiet bistro tucked into a narrow street near the river. The place smelled faintly of basil and old wood, the kind of restaurant where the same hands had kneaded dough for fifty years.

No cameras. No press. Just the faint hum of English conversation and the clinking of glass.

Hazel watched him over her wine glass, her posture perfect, her expression unreadable. Dimitri, for once, didn’t look like a man playing a role. His tie was slightly loosened; his voice gentler.

“I used to come here when I was younger,” he said. “Before all this. Before my life started belonging to other people.”

“Other people?”

He smiled faintly. “Investors. Parents. Society. You know the list.”

“I do,” Hazel replied.

He looked down, fingers tracing the edge of his plate. “My father used to tell me that men like us don’t fall in love. We negotiate it. I believed him for years.”

Hazel tilted her head, curiosity flickering like the flame of the candle between them. “And now?”

“Now I’m not sure.” He looked up, meeting her eyes. “You make me question it.”

The line wasn’t rehearsed. It lacked polish, even grace. That was how she knew it was real.

He had lied for years. But when he looked at her, the words felt too small to use as weapons.

Hazel didn’t soften, not visibly. But something inside her shifted, like glass under gentle pressure.

She took a sip of her wine and said only, “Careful, Dimitri. Curiosity can be mistaken for affection.”

He smiled faintly. “Then maybe I’ll risk the confusion.”

That night, Hazel stood before her mirror, removing her earrings one by one. The mansion was quiet, its corridors asleep.

Her reflection stared back, the perfect heiress, faultless, poised. But beneath the shimmer of glass, she looked… tired. Not defeated, not fragile, but subtly human.

A memory flickered, Charles’s laughter in the rain, his hand brushing against hers, the world they’d dreamed of before it was stolen by someone else’s name.

It vanished as quickly as it came.

“Don’t you dare break now,” she whispered to her reflection, voice steady, a command to her own heart.

The woman in the mirror obeyed.

Later that evening, the mansion stirred again. Valentina Castell returned from her “charity trip” with a silk scarf, an immaculate posture, and a perfume that could have masked deceit itself.

“My darling,” Valentina cooed, kissing Hazel’s cheek. “You were magnificent at the gala. The press adores you. Edwin would be proud.”

Hazel smiled, the kind of smile that didn’t quite touch her eyes. “You taught me well, Mother.”

“Of course I did.”

As Valentina walked away, her heels clicking down the marble corridor, Hazel caught a faint trace of something beneath the perfume, a sweet, chemical scent that didn’t belong.

Even the air around Valentina seemed rehearsed.

From her study, Hazel saw Dimitri on the terrace below, phone pressed to his ear. His expression was serious, tense, but not guilty. She couldn’t hear his words, but his stance told enough.

This wasn’t one of his flirtations or games.

The call lasted several minutes. When he finally hung up, he stood still for a moment, staring out into the garden. The wind caught his hair; the dusk light painted his silhouette in shades of gold and grey.

Something in him looked… fractured.

Hazel turned away before he could glance up. Her reflection in the glass of the window caught his outline, faint, ghostlike, and the smallest part of her wondered, what was he fighting for?

The omniscient voice lingered:

He was lying again. But this time, not to her. To himself.

Near midnight, Hazel sat in Edwin’s office. The room smelled faintly of cigar smoke and leather, remnants of the man who had built empires and broken others with a pen stroke.

Stacks of documents lay before her, contracts, financial plans, trust papers, her father’s world, now hers to command.

The portrait on the wall watched over her, Edwin Castell’s eyes caught in eternal calculation. She signed another page, her pen barely trembling.

“You taught me strength,” she whispered, almost to herself. “You never said it would be lonely.”

Outside, thunder murmured across the horizon.

Dimitri passed by the office door, pausing at the sound of her voice. He hesitated, his hand half-raised toward the doorknob.

He almost entered. Almost.

But he didn’t.

He let the silence stretch, then walked away, his footsteps soft, the distance between them deeper than marble could measure.

Hazel sat back in the chair, exhaled, and closed her eyes for one brief, stolen moment of rest.

The mansion, vast and gleaming, exhaled around her, beautiful, empty, and cold.