Empire Of Silence Series Novels & Stories

She doesn’t speak. I lean closer, my whisper laced with fury. “Only someone who hated her, or feared her, would dare such a thing. And you’ve always been both.” Her lips part, trembling. She tries to form a denial, but no words come. Nico’s voice cuts through the silence, sharp as a blade. “You hear that, Emily? That’s silence. That’s guilt choking you.” Emily’s eyes snap to him, then back to me, and finally she spits, “You can’t prove it.”

“Don’t call me that.” It was a threat that sent shivers on Amir’s spine. He might be young but his presence was as overwhelming as the head of the clan and the commander of the midnight serpents. His cold voice and icy glare would be enough to make average people tremble in fear. He could feel his authority by just standing there, even without saying a word. There was no doubt that the young man in front of him was Arkin Dio Amiel Josiah von Clandestine— the one and only crown prince of the empire.

At the DeLuca Family banquet announcing its new advisor, Matteo said he was going to end nine years of secrecy and finally acknowledge our relationship in public. I stood in the back row of the banquet hall, so nervous I'd crumpled my prepared speech into a ball. Over nine years, I'd cleaned up the port books for him three times, negotiated two cross-border shipping routes, and taken a bullet for him. Everyone knew the DeLuca Family had a female advisor who never showed her face, but no one knew I was that woman. I thought that after tonight, I would finally stop being his shadow. Until the screen at the front of the banquet hall lit up. There was no photo of us. Instead, there was only a si

She stared at the blank screen, something tight and aching settling deep in her chest. Suppressing her needs had become second nature, an instinct sharpened by years of learning what mattered and what didn’t. She knew how to be quiet. How to be agreeable. How to fold herself into the life Jay had built and call it partnership. But beneath the routine, beneath the discipline of wanting nothing, fault lines were spreading. And one day soon, the weight of silence would be more than she could hold.

TRIGGER WARNINGS: DEPICTIONS OF VIOLENCE AND BULLYING CONTAINED IN THIS CHAPTER. I open my mouth, but no words come out. An invisible hand pulls where my chest should be. I close my mouth, blink, and try again. “Did we… um—” He doesn’t let me finish. “No, we didn’t do anything,” his smile turns almost bashful. He moves his face closer to mine, like he’s about to say something, and I take a breath, moving back instinctively.

I grabbed a match from the mantle and struck it. “What are you doing?” Silas roared, lunging for me. I dropped the match. The gilt-edged pages, soaked in the dry rot of twenty years, caught instantly. The secrets of the Ares empire—the murders, the bribes, the “Conditioning”—erupted into a wall of orange flame. “I’m clearing the site,” I said. Silas tackled me, the weight of him slamming me into the mahogany desk. We hit the floor, a tangle of limbs and fury. I felt the detonator fly from his hand, skidding across the floor toward the vault.

She put the phone away and looked out again. The world wasn’t fixed. It never would be. But it wasn’t hidden anymore either. And that mattered. Because power had survived for so long on one thing. Silence. And now— Silence didn’t mean the same thing anymore. It wasn’t protection. It wasn’t control. It was something people questioned. Something they listened to. Something they refused to ignore. Emily exhaled slowly. Not relief. Not triumph. Just a quiet acknowledgment of something complete. Not perfect. Not clean.

BENEATH THE FACADE Behind the façade of wealth and power, a web of secrets awaits. CHAPTER 58 EMILY’S POV: The silence in the room was deafening. Not the calm kind that wraps itself around you like a blanket but the kind that presses down on your chest, steals your breath, and leaves your thoughts too loud. The cook had left a while ago, but my words clung to the walls like smoke. They replayed in my mind, again and again, no matter how hard I tried to shut them out.

The drive over to the apartment was filled with an uncomfortable silence. Unasked questions hung in the air like a thick fog. Beads of sweat prickled on the back of the drivers neck as he too was smothered by the tension in the car. The seconds felt like minutes as the road seemed to stretch longer and longer before her eyes. Letting her eyes close, Thea suppressed a sigh as she leant her head against the window, she ignored the drumming of her head against the window as they drove over the bumpy terrain. Bellamy’s words playing on repeat in her head, ‘like our souls recognise each other’.

The execution of myself and Bill seemed more plausible in the grand scheme of everything happening. The intensity of the struggle seemed to escalate with each passing moment, reaching a fever pitch that sent shivers down my spine. My breath came in slow, calculated spurts as I strained to hear any clue, any hint of the identities of those locked in the life-or-death battle just outside my room. And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the clamor ceased. The silence that followed was almost deafening, a stark contrast to the chaos that had preceded it. My heart slowed in my chest, and I strained my ears, attempting to discern any movement or conversation.