บททั้งหมดของ The Mistress: บทที่ 61 - บทที่ 70

“Why do you look like you’re about to fly, Zan zan?”The voice was tiny, high-pitched, and filled with the simple, unfiltered curiosity that only a five-year-old could possess. Ethan was sitting cross-legged on the plush cream rug, his brow furrowed in concentration. In his small, sticky hands, he clutched a weathered, glossy photograph he had fished out of an old cedar chest near the window.Zander froze. He had been mid-motion, reaching for a coffee mug on the counter, but he went perfectly still as his eyes fell on the boy. I stood in the shadow of the hallway, my heart skipping a beat. I hadn’t seen that photo in years.It was from that night. The College Gala. Before the blue ink, before the Gilded Grove, before the five-year winter. In the picture, Zander was leaning against a brick wall, looking younger and less scarred. I was laughing, my head thrown back, a drink in one hand and my heart in the other. Zander wasn’t looking at the camera; he was looking at me like I was a mirac

“Does it feel different, standing on a foundation that wasn’t built to bury you?”Zander’s voice was a low rumble, barely audible over the hum of the wind whipping across the observation deck of the Vermon Building. We were sixty stories above the pavement, standing on the literal crown of my grandfather’s legacy. For decades, this building had been the heart of the Vermon shipping empire, but under Michael Blackwood’s “stewardship,” it had become a cold monument to corporate greed.Tonight, the lights in the lobby didn’t pulse with Blackwood security codes. They glowed with the warm, steady amber of the Vermon-Sovereign Fund.I leaned against the glass railing, the city of our nightmares stretched out below us like a carpet of diamonds. From this height, the Aethelgard Estate was just a dark, scarred patch of land on the horizon—a grave for a monster. The Gilded Grove was a flickering dot in the distance, its power neutralized by the lawsuits and the sunlight we had brought to its dar

“Does it smell like home, Daniel? Or is the concrete a bit too honest for your liking?”My voice didn’t shake. It didn’t carry the jagged edge of hatred or the heavy weight of trauma. It was flat, clinical, and utterly cold—a mirror reflecting the gray, windowless room of the state penitentiary’s maximum-security wing.On the other side of the scratched plexiglass, the man who had once been the “Golden Son” of the High Council sat slumped in a bolted-down chair. He looked like a sketch of a human being that someone had tried to erase but stopped halfway through. His bespoke suits were gone, replaced by a rough, oversized jumpsuit the color of a dying sun. His hair, once his greatest vanity, was thinning, falling out in patches from the sheer, corrosive stress of his fall.Daniel Blackwood didn’t look like a monster anymore. He looked like a mistake.“Victoria,” he rasped, his voice sounding like dry leaves skittering across a tombstone. He leaned forward, his eyes wide and bloodshot, d

“Does the crown feel heavy, or is it just the realization that we’ve finally taken the throne?”Zander’s voice was a low vibration against my skin as he adjusted the lace at my shoulder. We stood before a floor-to-ceiling mirror in the master suite, our reflections framed by the golden light of a setting sun. I was draped in a gown of ivory silk, the train sweeping across the floor like a river of moonlight. On my finger, the sapphire ring caught the glow, but it was the look in Zander’s eyes that truly anchored me.He was dressed in a charcoal suit of such fine wool it looked like armor. He didn’t look like a bodyguard anymore. He didn’t even look like a soldier. He looked like the man the High Council had spent thirty years trying to suppress—a King who had found his Queen in the wreckage of an empire.“It’s not heavy, Zander,” I whispered, turning to face him. I placed my hand over the slight, nearly invisible curve of my stomach—our secret, our new heartbeat. “It feels like a found

“The crown doesn’t just sit on your head, Victoria. It sinks its teeth into your skin.”I stood at the floor-to-ceiling window of the Chairperson’s suite, my reflection ghosting over the neon-lit skyline of the city. One month. It had been exactly thirty days since the wedding, thirty days since the “Gilded Grove” was dismantled, and thirty days since I stopped being a victim and became a monarch.My hand drifted to my stomach, still flat beneath the sharp, architectural lines of my white blazer. Inside, a new heartbeat was a constant, silent reminder of what was at stake. I wasn’t just building a company anymore; I was building a world safe enough for a child who carried the blood of two warring empires.Behind me, the heavy oak doors of the office groaned open. I didn’t need to turn around to know it was Zander. I could feel the change in the room’s temperature—the way the air grew heavy, charged with that familiar, dark electricity that always followed him.“The Thorne brothers are