جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 48

The renaming of the Hawthorne Arts Initiative was not a gift. It was a golden leash, choked tight around my neck.Silas had spent ten million dollars not to save my mother’s legacy, but to prove that he had the power to resurrect the dead.He wanted me to look at the screen, see my name on the building, and feel gratitude.He wanted me to crawl into his lap and thank him for being a benevolent god.I sat at the dinner table, cutting my steak into precise, geometric squares. I did not thank him.I did not mention the news. I treated the ten-million-dollar endowment with the same crushing silence I gave the salt shaker.Silas sat across from me. He had been vibrating with a dark, kinetic energy since he returned home.He had dismissed the staff early. There were no footmen, no Mrs. Alastair.Just the two of us in the cavernous dining room, the silence stretching between us like a wire pulled to the breaking point."The halibut is overcooked," Silas stated, his voice loud in the empty ro

ElaraThe sun rose over the city, casting long, pale shadows across the master suite, but the bed beside me remained cold.Silas had not returned.For the first time since the wedding, I had slept alone in the center of the massive mattress.I should have felt relieved.I should have stretched my limbs into the empty space, savored the absence of his heavy, possessive heat, and breathed easier without the scent of sandalwood and repressed rage filling my lungs.Instead, I felt a knot of dread tightening in my stomach.Silas Vancewick did not retreat.He did not surrender ground.If he had abandoned the field of battle for a night, it was not because he was giving up; it was because he was rearming.I rose at six, adhering to the schedule he had set, though he wasn’t there to enforce it.I dressed in a high-necked dress of severe navy wool, the fabric scratching slightly against my skin.It was penitent armor.I pulled my hair back until my scalp ached, securing every strand.I sat at

ElaraThe master suite smelled of violence.It wasn't the metallic scent of blood, though I half-expected to see it staining the carpet. It was the scent of shredded wool, of ozone from the tracker on my wrist, and the heavy, suffocating pheromones of a man who had been pushed past the edge of reason.I stood in the center of the dressing room. I had removed the second grey dress the one I had put on after he ripped the black one. I was now standing in my slip, the gunmetal tracker stark and ugly against my pale arm.I was packing.Not to leave. I couldn't leave. The tracker, the guards, the contract… I was sealed in. I was packing away the last of Elara.I took the small, scuffed leather bag that held my paints. I placed it on the highest shelf, out of reach. I took the sketchbook I hadn't opened in weeks and slid it under a stack of heavy winter sweaters. I was burying the evidence of my soul.The door to the dressing room didn't open; it was already open. Silas was leaning against

ElaraThe Vancewick Tower was designed to intimidate. It was a monolith of black steel and glass that pierced the clouds, a physical manifestation of Silas’s ego.But today, the most intimidating thing in the building wasn't the architecture; it was the invisible, ten foot radius that leashed me to the man sitting behind the desk.I sat in the black leather chair by the window, the one Silas had designated as my "station." My hands were folded in my lap. My spine was straight.I looked out at the city, at the thousands of people moving freely on the streets below, and I felt the heavy, cold weight of the tracker humming against my wrist.Proximity Alert: Level One.It was a digital chain. If I moved more than ten feet away from Silas’s bio-key which was currently in his pocket the band would scream.It would announce my disobedience to the entire floor.Silas was working. Or pretending to.He sat at his massive desk, staring at a holographic projection of market data. His jacket was o