Chapter 9: Devon's Jealous Toast and Rowan's Revenge

“Someone was in my room,” I said. My voice did not sound like mine. “Someone stood over my bed.”

Rowan was already out of it, pulling on his trousers, his movements controlled and terrifying. He picked up the phone.

“Damien. Sweep the east wing. Now.”

He turned back to me. I was still sitting in the sheets, the photograph face down beside me.

“Get dressed,” he said. “You are not sleeping here tonight.”

“Where am I sleeping?”

“My room. Where I can see you.”

I should have argued. Instead, I pulled the sheet up to my chest and looked at the photo again. Me, in my red dress, smiling at the ballroom. Before my father burned. Someone had followed me there. Someone had followed me here.

“It could be my mother,” I whispered. “She was at the wedding.”

“Your mother does not leave threats under pillows.”

“Then who?”

“That is what I am going to find out.”

Damien found nothing. No fingerprints, no forced entry, no trace. The guard outside my door had seen no one. That was worse. It meant whoever had done it knew the house better than the men guarding it.

I slept in Rowan’s bed that night. I slept badly.

By morning, the world knew my father was dead.

I found out over breakfast, when my phone would not stop ringing. Natalie, eleven times. My mother, nine. Serena, twice. And then the news alerts.

“Billionaire Richard Cross Dead in Fire. Daughter Married to Crime Figure Rowan Morphy.”

“They are calling you the widow of the underworld,” I said flatly.

Rowan did not look up from his newspaper. “They are wrong. You are not a widow. You are a Morphy.”

“My father is dead and my first thought was that I was relieved.” My hands were shaking around the coffee cup. “What kind of daughter does that make me?”

He set the paper down. For a moment, his face was not cold at all.

“The daughter of a man who never deserved her.”

I did not cry. I was too hollow for crying.

“There is a dinner tonight,” Rowan said. “Sinclair’s charity dinner. Devon will be there.”

My stomach turned. “You want me to go?”

“I want everyone to see you standing upright the day after your father’s death. They will whisper. Let them. They will say Morphy is weak, his wife is broken. We will prove them wrong.”

“And Devon?”

Rowan smiled. It was not a kind smile. “Devon will do something stupid. Men like him always do.”

The Sinclair house glittered like a knife.

Every eye in the room turned when we walked in. I wore black. Rowan’s mother’s necklace sat at my throat like armor. He kept his hand on my back, and the heat of his palm made me feel less like a ghost and more like a weapon.

Devon found me within ten minutes.

“Sloane.” His voice was soft and wrecked. “God. I heard about your father. I am so sorry.”

“Are you?”

“Of course I am. He was—he was like a father to me too.”

“No, he was not. You sold him your loyalty in exchange for my sister, then cheated on me.” I smiled. “Let us not rewrite history in the same room where you made it.”

Devon’s face twisted. “You have changed.”

“Yes. I have.”

His eyes dropped to the necklace. To the ring. Something ugly crossed his face. “You married a killer.”

“I married a man who protected me. Something you never did.”

His jaw worked. Then he leaned closer. “He will destroy you, Sloane. He destroys everyone he touches. And when he does, do not come crawling back to me.”

“You would love that, would you not.”

The toast came at dessert.

Devon stood, glass in hand, smiling at the room. “I would like to raise a glass to Richard Cross. A great man. A family man.” His eyes slid to me. “I am sorry his daughter could not find comfort in the family he built, and instead found it in the arms of the man we all warn our children about.”

The room went still. Somewhere, someone gasped.

I felt my blood go hot and then cold. My father was three days dead. Three. And Devon Brooks was using him as a knife.

I started to stand. Rowan’s hand closed on my thigh beneath the table. Not hard. Firm.

“Stay,” he said quietly. And then he rose.

He did not raise a glass. He did not need to.

“Devon.” His voice carried without effort. “You are right about one thing. I am the man people warn their children about. Which is why you should be very careful what your children inherit, once I am done with you.”

Devon’s smile faltered. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means I have spent three weeks reading your company’s books.” Rowan took a slow sip of wine. “The offshore accounts. The falsified filings. The money you moved out of your partners’ pockets and into your own. I have copies of all of it.”

Devon went white. “You are lying.”

“Am I? Then call your lawyer. Ask him about the account in Malta. Ask him about the third quarter. Ask him why you took the money the same week you married a Cross.”

The room erupted in whispers. Devon’s glass fell from his hand and shattered on the floor.

Rowan looked at him with something like pity. Then he took my hand and drew me after him out of the ballroom, down a dark corridor, past a line of portraits, until he pushed open a door and pulled me inside a small study, shutting us in darkness.

His mouth was on mine before the door clicked shut.

“You are shaking,” he murmured against my jaw.

“You just ended him in front of everyone.”

“I told you I would.”

“You did not tell me it would feel like that.”

He pulled back, just enough to see me. His eyes were black with heat.

“Like what?”

“Like I wanted to watch.”

Something dark and pleased moved across his face. His hands found my hips and pressed me back against the desk.

“Say it again.”

“Rowan—”

“Say what you wanted to watch.”

“Him burning,” I whispered. “I wanted to watch him burn.”

“Good girl,” he said, and took my mouth again.

It was not gentle. It was teeth and breath and his thigh pushing mine apart, his hand fisting in my hair, the hard edge of the desk biting into my back. My dress slid from my shoulder. His mouth followed the bare skin down, and I arched, one hand braced on the desk, the other gripping his lapel.

“Sloane,” he said against my throat, rough and low. “Tell me you are mine.”

“I am yours.”

“Again.”

“I am yours, Rowan.”

He pulled me up onto the desk and stepped between my knees, and I wrapped my legs around him, and for a moment the world was nothing but heat and his mouth and the sound of my own heartbeat.

Then the door opened.

Light flooded the room. Rowan turned, shoving me behind him, one hand already reaching inside his jacket.

My mother stood in the doorway.

Her eyes moved from Rowan’s open shirt to my bare shoulder to my ruined lipstick.

“Well,” Eleanor Cross said, closing the door behind her. “I suppose that answers one question.”

Rowan’s voice was ice. “What question?”

My mother looked at me, and her face was not the quiet, apologetic face I had known my whole life.

“Whether you are actually in love with him,” she said, “or whether you are smart enough to be using him.”

She held up a small black card.

“Because that card was under your pillow, Sloane. And I am the one who put it there. I need to speak with you alone. Now. Before Vincent Moretti finds out what I know.”