He had chosen her.
Studied her.
Prepared for her.
Sera slammed the folder shut, her chest rising and falling rapidly. Fury burned through her veins so fast it almost made her dizzy.
“You planned it,” she whispered to the empty room. Her voice sounded broken. She picked the folder up again, flipping through it faster now, anger building with every page.
Every detail.
Every movement of her life was documented like she was some kind of project or prey.
Her eyes blurred suddenly.
Not with weakness.
Withrage.
Tears slipped down her cheeks anyway, hot and humiliating.
“You manipulated everything,” she choked out softly.
The room felt too small now.
Too suffocating.
Sera shoved the papers back into the folder and gripped the edges of the desk, trying to steady herself. Her heart hurt in a way she hadn’t expected because beneath the anger, beneath the betrayal, there was something worse.
Pain.
All those moments she had believed were real. All those conversations where she had thought he was learning about her naturally. All those looks he had given her like she was a mystery he was slowly unraveling. None of it had been discovered. He had already known.
Sera wiped angrily at her tears. “No,” she whispered, shaking her head.
Her fingers tightened around the file. If Lucien thought she would just accept this, if he thought she would quietly stay in this office like he told her, then he didn’t understand her at all.
The heartbreak inside her chest twisted into something sharper. Something dangerous. Because the one thing Sera had learned since stepping into Lucien’s world was that. Pain didn’t make her weak. It made her ruthless and when Lucien came back, she wasn’t going to cry. She was going to make him answer for every single page in that file.
The breach wasn’t random. The man from the terrace left something behind. A message burned into the south wall in black paint, “She is not yours.” and beneath it, a symbol. One that matched a necklace Sera has worn her entire life, one her “dead” mother gave her.
Sera didn’t remember leaving Lucien’s office. One moment she had been standing there with the file clenched in her hands, furyand heartbreak twisting inside her chest like a storm ready to break. The next she was already halfway down the corridor.
Her boots struck the marble floor hard with every step, echoing through the long hallway of the estate. Guards moved aside the second they saw her coming, exchanging uncertain glances but saying nothing. They had learned quickly that Sera wasn’t someone you stopped. Especially not when she looked like this.
Her grip on the folder tightened.
Her mind replayed every page.
Every photograph.
Every note.
Every piece of her life that Lucien had collected like it belonged to him.
Her chest burned.
He had studied her.
