CHAPTER 6

Roxanne's POV

The sharp clink of shattered crystal against imported Italian marble echoed through the suddenly dead-silent ballroom. For a terrifying, suspended second, nobody breathed. The ambient hum of the string quartet died away as the musicians realized their audience was entirely transfixed by the frozen tableau near the champagne tower.

Victoria Sterling stood staring at me as if she had just seen a ghost crawl out of an open grave. Her meticulously painted lips parted in a silent gasp, color completely draining from her face until she looked like porcelain left out in the snow. Beside her, her father’s face mottled from a polite flush into a deep, furious crimson. The elderly patriarch of the Sterling empire opened his mouth, struggling to find a veneer of polite diplomacy after being publicly blindsided by the most feared fixer in the city.

"A wedding?" Mr. Sterling finally managed, his voice trembling slightly with suppressed rage as he forced his gaze from my face up to Kiran. "Without notice? Without so much as a whisper in high-society circles? Forgive me, Cross, but a union that sudden usually smells less like romance and more like a desperate attempt to launder an inconvenience."

The insult hung heavy in the air, sharp enough to draw blood. Heads turned from across the room, murmurs starting to ripple through the clusters of wealthy socialites and corporate sharks.

I felt the heavy, reassuring warmth of Kiran’s hand resting firmly against the small of my back. He didn't flinch, nor did his expression warm by a single degree. Instead, his dark eyes narrowed into cold, predatory slits as he looked down at the older man.

"An inconvenience, Arthur?" Kiran’s voice cut across the space with a lethal, quiet authority that made the surrounding executives physically step back. "I wasn't aware that my choice of a legal partner required an advance audit from a family whose primary corporate assets are currently sitting under an emergency federal audit. Or perhaps you're simply unaccustomed to people marrying for something other than a hostile corporate takeover."

A sharp, collective gasp rippled through the onlookers. Everyone in the city knew the Sterling real estate empire was aggressively pushing for a massive downtown acquisition, but only a handful of insiders knew the federal trade commission was sniffing around their balance sheets. Kiran had just dropped a live grenade right in the middle of their victory party.

Victoria finally found her voice, her tone shaking with a toxic mix of panic and malice as she stepped past her father. "She’s a nobody, Kiran! Look at her—she’s a common criminal, a low-life scavenger who doesn't even belong in this building, let alone on your arm! Ask her where she was forty-eight hours ago. Ask her what she was doing inside Crimson Heights the night Ethan died!"

The moment the words left her mouth, a heavy, suffocating silence slammed back down over the ballroom. Victoria froze instantly, a sudden look of blind panic washing over her face as she realized what she had just admitted in front of a room full of hundred-word-per-minute gossip columnists and journalists.

She hadn't just exposed her family's intimate knowledge of the exact timeline of Ethan’s murder; she had practically screamed our secret accusation to the entire upper crust of the city.

I let out a soft, cold breath, my lips curving into a razor-sharp smile. "How interesting, Victoria," I said, my voice cutting through the ringing silence like a scalpel. "The police reports stated that Ethan Vance’s apartment wasn't accessed by anyone outside official forensics until noon the following day. Yet here you are, shouting across a crowded room about who was inside that penthouse on the exact night he was murdered. Care to tell these gentlemen how you knew the timeline so precisely?"

The color vanished entirely from Victoria’s face. She turned wide, terrified eyes toward her father, who looked as though he had just swallowed a mouthful of broken glass. The surrounding socialites immediately took two synchronized steps backward, the sudden realization dawning on them like a breaking wave.

Kiran didn't waste a single heartbeat of the advantage. He pulled a sleek, slim silver tablet from the inside pocket of his tuxedo jacket with his free hand, tapping the glass screen twice before resting it casually on the edge of the nearest catering table.

"For those interested in actual legal documentation rather than high-society hysterics," Kiran announced smoothly, his voice carrying effortlessly across the entire hall, "my firm has just filed an emergency motion for a comprehensive forensic review of the Crimson Heights property, backed by raw, unedited security logs and digital evidence proving unlawful obstruction of justice by certain local real estate dynasties."

He turned his gaze back to Mr. Sterling, who was now trembling with a mix of fury and sheer terror.

"Consider this an opening statement," Kiran added quietly, his fingers tightening gently against my waist. "Shall we dance, my love?"

Without waiting for a reply, Kiran swept me smoothly into the center of the floor as the orchestra hastily scrambled to resume playing, desperately trying to drown out the unfolding scandal. I let myself move with him, keeping my eyes locked on the pale, panicked faces of our enemies across the room as the first real battle of our war officially began.