All Chapters of The Black Rose: Chapter 121 - Chapter 128

ELLIE My father accepted the glass with a small nod, his eyes moving past me to the garden beyond the open doors, and I could see it in him then, the restlessness of a man who had been traveling and hadn't quite settled back into his own walls yet. He was a paranoid man, confident yet smartly paranoid enough to know he cannot trust anyone. A mentality that he's adamant to imbibe in me.Yet, foolishly, he trusts me."How were the Russians?" I asked, falling into step beside him as he moved toward the doors.He made a sound that wasn't quite dismissive and wasn't quite satisfied. "Thorough. Cautious." A pause. "Ultimately agreeable."We stepped out into the garden, the heat is immediate and heavy after the air-conditioned cool of the sitting room. Singapore in the afternoon was never gentle about it. The gravel path curved through manicured hedges that were so precisely shaped they looked artificial, and somewhere beyond the high perimeter wall a bird was doing something persistent an

LORENZO The mansion at the address sat at the end of a long private road behind gates that glowed gold in the dark, lit from below in the kind of way that had nothing to do with visibility and everything to do with statement. The grounds beyond were immaculate, manicured to the last inch, water features catching the light, landscaping that cost a fortune to maintain in Singapore's humidity. I'd expected something like this. Vittorio had spent fifteen years building an empire from invisibility, and tonight he was choosing to let people see a fraction of what that looked like. That choice told me something about where he believed he stood, and it wasn't somewhere modest."Christ," Silas murmured from the backseat as we rolled up the drive behind a long column of expensive cars. "You could fit most of our Milan operation inside that place.""Two safe houses at least," Noir said — the first words he'd produced in over an hour — and the sentence seemed to catch him slightly off guard, lik

ELLIE My father's eyes find the label on the bottle and I watch the small lift at the corners of his mouth, the way his chin rises just slightly, genuine pleasure softening the calculation he wears so constantly that I sometimes forget what he looks like without it. "Eliana." He turns to me with something close to wonder in his voice. "How on earth did you manage this?"I smile at him with every tooth. "I have my ways."He laughs, looking rather excited and reaches over to squeeze my hand, and the warmth of his palm against mine makes my skin pull tight with the effort of not recoiling. "That she does," he tells the table, pride soaking every syllable, and I feel their eyes on me from across the table, Lorenzo's, Silas's, Noir's, the weight of them pressing into the side of my face like something physical, and I keep my gaze on my father.And then he doesn't drink.He looks at his glass — still smiling, completely unhurried — and lifts it toward the table with the generosity of a ho

ELLIE He looks exactly the same and completely different at once.I used to love that face, that knowing smirk that played on his lips and once upon a time, almost a year ago I went through unimaginable pain thinking I would never see those eyes again. The image of his face with a hole in his head haunted my dreams and sometimes still does.I look at him now and I do not feel love. This is the man that ruined my life just so he can have power. He's not my brother.He's my step brother.My enemy. the blonde hair, the blue eyes, the easy way he holds himself, all of it familiar in the deep involuntary way that only family can be familiar. He smiles when he sees me, wide and genuine and the infuriating. "Ellie." He steps forward with his arms open. "It's so good to—"I take a step back. My hand comes up, not aggressive, just — no. He stops. His arms drop.I look at my father. "He's supposed to be your enemy."My father's expression is serene. "Elijah is still my stepson, after a fashi