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I stood at the head of the mahogany table, my hands resting flat against the polished wood. My pulse was a steady, deafening drumbeat in my ears. I didn’t care about Marcus and Lorenzo’s shipping routes. I didn’t care about the East Side port authority. For the first time in years, the empire I had built felt entirely irrelevant. All because of the girl in the forest green gown. That girl. She had sat at my table, surrounded by the most dangerous men in the North, and she hadn’t flinched. She had worn my signature color, my armor, and had weaponized it, letting the gown drape over her curves like a challenge.Every time she looked at me over the rim of her champagne glass, it wasn’t with the submission of a ward. It was with the starving patience of a wolf waiting for the hunters to leave the woods. “ You’re playing a dangerous game, Elizabeth.” Silas’s voice cut through the silence. He was still sitting in his chair, his grey eyes fixed on the empty doorway where Tatiana had dis
I got to the hallways heading to the dining room; the usual quiet silence of the estate was replaced by the chatter of wealthy men, the occasional deep chuckle of people who owned politicians, and the clicking of expensive crystal glasses. It was a sound I had only ever heard from the outside of high-rise windows back in the South, from the people who bled us dry. Following the voices, I rounded the heavy marble archway and stepped into the dining room. The sheer scale of the setup looked like a buffet on absolute steroids, entirely disproportionate for the small number of people actually seated around the table. Silver dishes gleamed under the massive crystal chandelier, filled with delicacies that looked more like modern art pieces than food. Silas Vane was resting at the head of the table. He looked entirely detached from reality, lounging back in his chair with an expression that screamed he was thoroughly uninterested in whatever conversation was happening around him. His shirt
For a few minutes, I just sat there in the dim blue light coming off the server, my breath rattling in my throat, sounding entirely too loud in the reinforced silence of the room. My skin still felt raw where her fingers had traced a slow, agonizing line down my arm. “He won’t find it,” her voice still echoed in my mind. Very cold and precise. “Because by the time he’s strong enough to walk down those stairs, Silas would have convinced him otherwise. And you, Tatiana… You’re going to help him believe it.”I touched my lower lip. It was swollen from her kiss. A kiss that now felt less like passion and more like a binding contract. She had looked at me with those ancient, pale eyes of hers and dropped the ultimate leverage: “I’ll show him your file. I’ll show him that his sister wasn’t a survivor. She was a witness who never said a word.” How dare she! Those words tore at the scars I tried so hard to hide. She knew. She knew that when our father was breaking Luca back in the South, I
I stood in the heavy silence, my heart trying to beat its way out of my ribs. My lips were still burning from Elizabeth’s mouth; a calculated fire that had turned into something brutal. The discipline was a lie. I had seen the crack, felt the way her hands had trembled against my waist before she’d smoothed my dress and walked away to play the Queen of the North. But as the adrenaline of the kiss began to drop, it was replaced by a cold, sharp clarity. Elizabeth was stepping out. Silas was anchored to Luca’s bedside like a predator guarding his broken prize. The house was supposed to be a fortress, but to a girl who had spent years learning how to be the space between shadows. It was just a puzzle. In the South Side, I had survived by being the ghost that no one bothered to hunt. Here, among the portraits of dead Vanes, I was more than that. I was an anomaly. I moved through the East wing, my footsteps making no sound. I avoided the main corridors, sticking to the service passages
The East Wing smelled of the faint, lingering citrus scent of the polish the cleaner used to mask the age of the wood and unused potential. It was a wing designed for guests who were meant to be seen and not heard. I had walked these floors for over thirty years, the architect of a dynasty that thrived on the art of being untouchable. But as I stood outside Tatiana De Santis’s suite, my hand hovering over the heavy oak door, the discipline felt like a corset that had been pulled one notch too tight. I had delayed the Beauforts’ arrival. Silas was still anchored to the master suite, drowning in his obsession with the boy they had broken, which left me to manage the other complication. I told myself it was a tactical necessity. We needed Tatiana to look the part of a ward, a polished jewel of the North, before we paraded her in front of the Board. But as I pushed the door open, I knew I was lying to myself. Tatiana was standing by the window. She had stripped off the scuffed boots a
I tried to open my eyes, but my eyelids felt like they had been stitched shut with lead. My body felt like a distant country, heavy and unresponsive, vibrating with the aftershocks of a storm I couldn’t quite remember. There was a weight on my face, a plastic seal that smelled of sterile rubber and stale condensation. Oxygen mask. Memory came back in jagged, painful shards: the gold-leafed ceiling of the party, taste of the drink, the way the floor had tilted until the world was made of marble and shoes. And then, the crushing pressure in my heart as if an invisible hand had reached into my ribs and squeezed until the light went out.I let out a soft, broken moan, the sound muffled by the mask. “Don’t fight it, Luca.”The voice was a low vibration that seemed to pull me back from the edge of the void. It wasn’t the voice of the doctor or nurse. It was the voice of the man who had bought my life and now seemed determined to keep it. I forced my eyes open. The room was bathed in a d
Detox wasn’t a ‘journey.’ It was a war. The next three days were a blur of grey walls and white-hot agony. I spent most of it curled into a ball on Silas’s black silk sheets, shivering so hard I thought my teeth would shatter. I pulled the blue robe tighter around my shivering body. Every minute w
I sat there, shaking, the silence rushing back in to fill the space she’d left. I felt the absence of Xanax like a physical hole in my brain. My heart was doing that weird, irregular skip. Again. My legs felt like jelly as I stood and made my way to the closet. It was a walk-in. Rows of charcoal s
I opened my eyes, and for a second, I thought I was blind. Everything was grey. I felt the silence, and it wasn’t the peaceful kind. It was the heavy, suffocating silence of a grave. The pale, ghostly light of Chicago morning was filtering in. I tried to sit up, but my body felt like it had been
I stood over him, my hands curled into fists. I watched the “South Side Prince” collapse into a heap of white silk and trembling limbs on my marble floor. The silence that followed was heavy. Usually, this kind of silence meant a death sentence in my head. But as I looked down at the boy, I didn’t f







