My pulse remains steady, but my interest sharpens. “So, this is about being seen.”
His stare is vicious now. “It’s about being erased.”
I nod slowly, like I’m indulging a child. “Alright.”
That seems to throw him off. He expected outrage or denial. He expected me to defend myself with ego. Instead, I remain calm, and I know that calm irritates him more than anger ever would.
“Say something,” he says.
“I’m listening.”
His nostrils flare. “No, you’re not. You’re waiting for me to incriminate myself.”
I smile slightly. “If the shoe fits.”
Lucien’s mouth twists. He leans forward against the cuffs as far as they allow.
“You didn’t even notice,” he says, and the sentence comes out with real venom now, finally stripping off the last of the polite performance. “Five years, Vincenzo. Five years, and you didn’t notice a damn thing until it blew up in your bed. Do you know what that proves?”
I look at him. “Tell me.”
“It proves you’re not as capable as you think you are,” he says, voice low, triumphant in the ugliest way. “It proves you’ve been sleepwalking through your own empire while everyone elsecarries the weight. It proves you’re too busy being a king in public and a ghost in private to keep your eyes open.”
The words are designed to hurt, but they don’t—not in the way he wants.
Because I know why he’s saying them. He wants to be the one holding power in this room. He wants to be the one inflicting damage. If he can make me react, he can make me sloppy. I watch him in silence until he starts to look uncertain, then I stand.
The chair scrapes softly against stone. Lucien’s tense gaze tracks me as I walk around the table slowly. No sudden moves, no drama. Just a king crossing his own cellar.
Lucien’s eyes follow me with increasing unease. “What are you doing?”
I stop behind him. He can’t see my face now, and that’s deliberate.
I lean down slightly, close enough for him to feel my presence at his shoulder without being able to read my expression.
“I’m going to ask you one more time,” I say quietly. “And if you give me anything other than the truth, I’m going to make the rest of your evening very unpleasant.”
His breath catches.
“What. Else.” He doesn’t answer, and I let the silence stretch just long enough to make him feel how alone he is.
Then I reach forward and grab his hair at the back of his head, not yanking hard enough to tear, but hard enough to make the point. He makes a sound through his teeth, and his shoulders tighten. I angle his head back so he has to look up at the ceiling.
“No one is coming,” I tell him. “You and I both know this is the room where truth arrives, one way or another.”
His voice is strained. “Vincenzo—”
“Five years,” I say, and my calm finally cracks just enough to show steel. “Five years of you standing at my side while yourhand was in my wife, and your fingers were in my empire. That means you didn’t just betray me in the bed, you betrayed me in the boardroom.”
He stays silent. I tighten my grip on his hair hard enough to make him inhale sharply.
“Tell me,” I say. “Or I’ll start guessing, and you won’t like what I guess.”
Lucien’s throat works once, then, finally, he speaks.
“I haven’t just been sleeping with Arabella for the last five years. I’ve been working against you,” he says, and the words land with a kind of ugly satisfaction, like saying them out loud is his last remaining act of defiance. “Since you married her and started disappearing into your office every night like a man already dead. Since you let the Five Families think you were unbreakable while the truth was you were just empty.”
I release his hair and step back into his line of sight, letting him see my face.
