Her face tightens. The porcelain doll is cracking. "You will leave. Now."
"No," I say again. And with a deliberate, steady hand, I walk to the massive marble coffee table between us and place the wooden box upon it. The sound of the wood hitting the stone is a gunshot in the silent room.
Dimitri takes a step forward, his eyes narrowed on the box. He knows it.
"You wear my sister's death like a crown," I say, my voice low and shaking with a fury I don't know I possess. "I'm here to watch it choke you."
"You have two seconds to walk out of this house," Dimitri says, his voice a low, gravelly threat. He is used to giving orders. He is used to being obeyed.
I look from his cold, dead eyes to my mother's furious face. I laugh. It is a broken, ugly sound.
"You think these walls are your strength?" I ask, the words pouring out of me, a torrent of fire and ice. "Cassian taught me that cages have two sides. I'm not trapped in here with you. You're trapped in here with me."
And I click open the box.
I don't reach for the recorder. I reach for the marriage certificate. I pull it out and slide it across the cold marble. It stops just before it reaches Dimitri's hand.
"You didn't marry a grieving mother," I spit. "You bought a co-conspirator."
Dimitri looks at the paper, then back at me, a flicker of something that might have been surprise in his dead eyes. Caroline’s face goes white. The porcelain has shattered.
CRASH.
The sound of the massive front doors being thrown open rocks the entire room.
And there stands Cassian.
He is a hurricane in the doorway, his chest heaving, his face a mask of primal fury. He has come, he has followed the breadcrumb, and he has walked right into my trap.
But he isn't looking at his father. He isn't looking at my mother.
He is looking at me. And the hunt is back in his eyes. He isn't here to save them. He is here because I have brought the war to his front door, and he is the only one who knows how to fight it.
Forty Six
Cassian
Iamacreatureofinstinct. My life is a series of calculated risks and violent certainties, but beneath the cold logic of my empire my blood runs on a current of pure, animal impulse. It is this instinct that has kept me alive. It is this instinct that has been screaming her name ever since the elevator doors closed.
I follow the digital breadcrumb she left me, a single taxi ride pinging on the network I have wrapped around this city like a shroud. It is a taunt. A deliberate, arrogant flare in the dark. Sheis not running to the edges of the map, she is not cowering in some forgotten corner. She is running straight to its dark, rotten heart. To him.
The gates to my father’s kingdom are open. They should not be. The sight of them swinging slowly in the wind sends a spike of cold, primal dread through me that has nothing to do with my own safety. This is wrong. She is a lamb walking into a slaughterhouse, thinking she is a wolf. The arrogance of it is beautiful. The foolishness of it is terrifying.
I don’t park. I abandon the car in the middle of the sweeping circular driveway, the engine still running, its ticking a frantic heartbeat in the oppressive silence of the grounds. The front doors of the mansion are massive, carved oak monstrosities meant to intimidate kings and politicians. I throw them open with such force that the right one splinters from its top hinge with a groan of tortured wood and slams into the marble wall.
And I see her.
The scene is a tableau from a nightmare, a perfectly staged piece of theater in hell. She stands in the center of that sterile, white mausoleum my father calls a living room. She is a splash of dark, defiant color in a world of bleached bone. Her face is pale, her eyes are burning, and on the massive marble table between her and them sits my mother’s box.
My ghosts. She brought my ghosts into his house. The sheer, sacrilegious audacity of it makes the air shimmer.
My father, Dimitri, stands there, a statue of tailored rage, his hands clasped behind his back as if restraining himself from murder. And beside him, the woman. Her mother. Caroline. The architect of this new, grotesque chapter of our family’s history, her face a mask of furious indignation. They are cornering her. Two ancient predators, circling a creature that has wandered into their territory.
But then I see her eyes. They are not the eyes of a lamb. They are the eyes of the woman who faced me in that warehouse, the woman who weaponized my grief and threw it in my face. There is terror there, yes, a fine tremor in her hands but it is dwarfed by a suicidal, incandescent fury. She is not a wounded animal. She is a bomb, and she has brought herself to the heart of his kingdom to detonate.
She has lit a fire in my father's house, and she has just summoned the dragon.
Dimitri’s voice is a low rumble, the sound of rocks grinding together. "You have two seconds to walk out of this house."
