CHAPTER FOUR
We drove in silence, raindrops racing each other down the tinted windows, turning the city lights into liquid silver.
Dion kept his eyes on the road. He never pried unless I brought something up first, and then he reminded me of every Morgan Freeman character who’d ever offered quiet wisdom.
The gates to the estate parted for us, then sealed shut with a mechanical sigh. My beautiful prison, welcoming me home. I noticed it immediately, almost every window blazing with light.
My father hadn’t gone to bed.
“I can get that,” Dion rushed.
“I’ve got it.” I was already pushing the car door open, tugging my dress straight, arranging my face into something unreadable.
“You’ll be, okay?” he asked quietly.
This man was so incredibly sweet, but there wasn’t anything he could even if I wasn’t.
“I’ll be fine,” I reassured him with a soft smile.
“One day I hope you mean that. Goodnight, Selene.” His voice was quiet.
“Goodnight.”
He climbed back into the car and his headlights lingered until I was safely inside. Not to keep me in, but to keep harm out. The kind of protection my actual father had never bothered with.
Inside, I moved toward the formal living room like a prisoner to the gallows. This wasn’t a choice; it was ritual. I hesitated at the threshold, my eyes drawn to that spot on the hardwood where my mother’s blood had pooled and darkened.
No amount of scrubbing had erased it completely. Some stains were eternal.
My father’s silhouette cut against the firelight, ramrod straight, a monument to his own authority. I stood in silence, knowing better than to speak first. One minute passed. Two. Three. I didn’t dare shift my weight.
Finally, he pivoted, his eyes dissecting me like surgical instruments. “Well?”
“He said he would like to see me again.”
The silence that followed made my skin crawl. His pleasure was always more terrifying than his rage. He nodded once—a judge passing sentence. “Good. You see what happens when you listen like a good girl? When you do what’s required of you?”
“Yes, sir.” The words tasted like ash.
“If he follows through as I expect, this family will finally have what it’s owed.”
He crossed the space between us, and I fought the urge to back away as he drew close enough for me to count the tiny blood vessels in his eyes, to see the jagged scar near his temple, the one my mother had given him with a broken wine bottle.
His voice dropped, soft as a knife sliding home. “Don’t mistake progress for success, Selene. One doesn’t guarantee the other.” He studied me for a moment too long, the line of his mouth curving into something cruel. “Did you let him touch you?”
My brow furrowed. “No.”
“Are you sure?” His fingers twitched at his side.
“We were at a restaurant,” I reminded him, each word careful. “There were other people.”
He laughed softly, the sound too close, too familiar. “Ah, Selene. You’re still so fucking na?ve. Men like him—men like me—we don’t need privacy to take what we want.”
Well, I want to cut your throat while you sleep, I thought.
“You don’t agree?” His eyes bored into mine, demanding submission.
The silence stretched between us like a tripwire. I could feel the air change, the shift in his breathing, old instinct warning me just before his temper found its mark because no matter how obedient I was, it wasn’t ever enough.
His hand became a weapon, seizing my hair with such savage force that individual roots screamed in protest. My head snapped back, neck exposed. The pained scream that surged up died stillborn as my teeth sank into my tongue.
“Don’t think,” he hissed, lips brushing my ear with obscene intimacy, “that because you may leave this house, and soon spread your legs for that Kostas trash to get the first go at your virgin cunt, that anyone but me will ever own you, Selene.”
His grip wrenched tighter, twisting until my vision fractured with unshed tears.
Then came the shove—not just backward but downward, as if he meant to drive me through the floor itself.
My body became weightless, then crashed with bone-jarring force that sent shockwaves through my spine and expelled every molecule of oxygen from my lungs in a single, pathetic gasp that made me feel all the smaller and humiliated.
I braced, waiting for him to kick me while I was down, but he simply stood motionless above me, neither flinching nor offering help, his shadow blocking the light.
"See. That's your rightful place," he soothed mockingly. "You can get up so long as you don’t forget that. I expect to see you at breakfast.”
Then he was gone.
I stayed exactly where I was a moment longer, my breath shaking but controlled, my cheek pressed against the polished hardwood that still held the ghost of my mother’s blood. It was cold against my skin, grounding me in this moment of forced submission.
Every part of me screamed to break, to shatter, to weep.
My throat constricted with the effort of containment, my chest a pressure cooker of unshed tears, but I’d cauterized those pathways years ago with white-hot determination.
Tears were one of his favorite novelties, trophies he’d collect with a cruel smile.
What rose instead wasn’t grief.
It was hatred—pure, undiluted, and alive.
It scorched through my veins like acid, eating away at anything soft I could have ever felt for him.
His loathing was a match; mine was napalm.
It coiled inside me like a viper waiting to strike, finding sanctuary in the darkest chambers of my heart where his fists and filth could never reach.
Someday our places would be reversed.
I would stand over him as he lay broken, watching recognition dawn in those cruel eyes when he finally understood that I was the architect of his downfall.
The dress felt heavier in daylight, a second skin cut from blood-red velvet. It hugged every line of me, a bodycon silhouette I hadn’t chosen so much as claimed.
My mother’s necklace rested against my collarbone, its gold catching the morning light like a quiet rebellion.
My heels clicked down the corridor, counting down to something I wasn’t ready for.
He always insisted on eating together, and I never understood why. Maybe it was the illusion of family, or maybe he liked the symmetry of it.
The obedient daughter across from the man who owned her silence.
Sleep had evaded me all night, rage simmering beneath my skin with nowhere to go.
Amara wouldn’t call for another two days, our conversations strictly scheduled, voice only, never text.
Those calls anchored me when nothing else did.
Without them, I drifted in isolation—exactly as our father intended.
I always wondered why he allowed me to have a connection with her when he seemed so angry she’d slipped away from his grasp.
Maybe it was meant to be another twisted form of punishment for something I had no control over.
Once, I'd had someone close to me. Coraline. Until the night I wandered through the house wondering what was taking her so long to get us something to snack on and found her in the kitchen with her leggings shoved down and my father thrusting into her over the island.
The sound had hit me first—wet, rhythmic, animal—before I fully processed what I was seeing. She saw me. Her eyes, glassy with something beyond pleasure, locking with mine. She’d given me a look of victory, or maybe triumph and I realized she had never actually been my friend.
After that, every girl who smiled at me became a potential traitor. Every woman who reached for my hand became another weapon he could use.
The isolation wasn’t loneliness; it was a fortress I’d built stone by stone around myself, each rebuff and cold shoulder another layer of protection.
But in the darkest hours before dawn, when the house settled into its hollow silence, sometimes my defenses would crack.
I’d catch myself rehearsing conversations with ghosts, silently spilling all the words I’d swallowed down for months.
When I entered the dining room, the absurdity of it struck me all over again. A table fit for twenty, dressed for two. Crystal, silver, and fresh flowers. An entire performance of civility for no audience.
He sat at the head, his tablet and stylus before him, breakfast untouched. His gaze lifted—slow—lingering first on the dress, then on my necklace before it reached my face.
At least we sat at opposite ends of the damn table. Distance was a small mercy, but I’d take it. I had more than a few daydreams about driving a knife through the back of the hand he liked to strike me with before planting my fork clean into his jugular.
Then maybe breakfast would finally be as lovely as it was always presented.
He glanced up again, the faintest curl of a smile tugging at his mouth once I was in my chair. “You look like your mother did at your age.”
His tone was warm—almost fond. As if yesterday hadn’t happened. Or the day before. Or all the other days before that. That was his favorite trick. Cruelty disguised as normalcy. Pretend long enough that nothing was wrong, and eventually, the silence between you began to agree.
We ate in that silence.
The quiet hum of utensils, the slow sips from porcelain as he worked and ignored me. Every sound too neat, and too civilized. Halfway through my meal that tasted like sawdust thanks to him, he set his stylus down.
“Alaric will be joining us for dinner this evening,” he informed me. “He seems intent on moving quickly.”
So, he was serious about handling things.
I wondered if Danielle Rousseau knew. If she’d heard the news and laughed because he was considering being paired off with someone like me. I realized I hadn’t given him a response when his chair creaked, the sound deliberate, like the clearing of a throat.
“This should be good then,” I told him what he wanted to hear, my voice even.
He chuckled low, the sound without mirth. “Then you know not to ruin it.”
I didn’t reply that time.
There was nothing left to say. He retreated behind his tablet while I dissected a slice of melon into perfect cubes. Somewhere inside me, the dangerous spark of possibility refused to die.
I would take this as a sign.
If Alaric Kostas wanted to marry me to serve his own agenda, so be it. My father could savor his imagined victory. What he saw as another lock on my cage, I was starting to see as the key I'd been waiting for.