I remember the warning Dom once gave me. About how Kian would turn love into a weapon the moment he sensed it. How every show of affection becomes ammunition. The moment anyone knows what we are to each other, it’ll be used to bleed us dry.
Most Founding Family marriages aren’t love stories. They’re contracts, power plays, and political strategy hidden behind diamond rings. Dom has risked everything for us.
“We should go.” He stands suddenly, the chair scraping against the floor.
I follow, muscles stiff, barely catching my clutch as it tumbles off the edge of the table.
“You’ll visit me tomorrow, won’t you, sweetheart?” Kian’s eyes meet mine, and despite the warmth in his voice, the threat beneath is unmistakable. “I’ve come into something about your parents and theirunfortunate accident. Family looks after its own, and you know how I treasure secrets.”
“I’ll think about it,” I say, matching his smile with one of my own.
“To the future Mrs. Blackwood.” He raises his glass. “Don’t keep me waiting, Aria. You know how I get when I’m bored.”
The hover-car pierces Eclipsera’sperpetual dusk, each heartbeat of silence stretched to a breaking point. Dom’s fingers strangle the controls, tendons stark against skin. The darkness in his eyes mirrors the city sprawling below—glorious, ruthless, fractured. A graveyard of secrets waiting to be unearthed.
The silence isn’t absence but pressure, a living thing barbed and breathing. Each inhale tastes of betrayal and unspoken bargains, of a love rigged to snap shut, and of Kian’s smile when he announced it, smug with the satisfaction of a man who had planned this moment since before I was born.
Marriage.
They planned my fucking marriage.
I swallow the scream building in my throat. One sound or crack, and everything I’ve buried might claw its way free.
I press my temple to the window, letting the glass siphon heat from my skin. Below, the Rift District yawns wide and unraveling, its metal railings crumbling to rust, charm-signs sputtering into static, neon gloss rotting at the edges. Firelight flickers through shattered windows, casting slivers of humanity across broken walls. On the corner, a drum circle beats from instruments played by workers still in their oil-stained uniforms, their dull, mass-produced rubiescatching the streetlight as they dance as though the week hasn’t already bled them dry.
Movement catches my eye. Black uniforms, armor gleaming with spelled protection, as they smash a man into the alley wall. His body convulses once before collapsing, blood streaking across stone, wet and glistening. An enforcer rips a baton from his belt, violet magic sparking along its length, and drives it down. I turn toward it, but Dom accelerates, the hover-car slicing through the gloom as screams vanish behind tinted glass.
Keep moving. Breathe. Pretend none of it touches you. Just another night in Eclipsera, and a reminder of what happens to people who step out of line.
Dom’s gaze remains fixed on the horizon, as if the answers we need might materialize in the space between stars. He offers no explanation or defense.
I fold my arms tightly over my chest. “When exactly were you planning to tell me?”
“Would it have changed anything if I had?” His jaw flexes, but his eyes stay glued to the road.
A laugh claws its way up my throat. “That’s your excuse?”
“What do you want, Aria?” His voice holds a dangerous edge. One that usually makes me want to kiss him or kill him. Right now, I’m leaning toward the latter. “That I didn’t warn you about something that was always going to happen? That I didn’t give you time to run?”
“You let me walk in there blind!” The words exploded out of me. “You sat there, silent as a grave, while your father carved up my future like . . .” My nails bite crescents into my palms. “Was any of this real? Or am I just another trophy in your family’s collection?”
That lands. Something dangerous flickers in his expression.
“Everything between us has been real. Don’t you dare question that.”
“Then explain the silence.” My voice wavers. “Explain why you said nothing whileKian—”
“If you think I have power, you’re wrong. I haveallowances. Leash length. Privilege worn as a collar, soaked in someone else’s blood. But control? Ownership? I don’t hold any of it.” He looks at me then. “And neither do you.”
I flinch. Not at his words, but at the truth inside them.
For a breath, uninvited, Rowe’s face forms behind my eyes. He would’ve warned me. Offered choices instead of chains. I drown that thought in the dark where it belongs.
“I love you. But becoming a Blackwood . . .” Fear claws up my spine. “Your father would own every breath and heartbeat. There’d be no way out.”
“He already thinks he owns you.” Dom lets out a cold laugh. “Marriage just adds his signature to the deed.”
“And that doesn’t bother you?”
