CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A sliver of sunlight sliced across my desk. For hours I'd watched it creep toward me, measuring the morning in inches while documents sat untouched beneath my hands, my thoughts elsewhere entirely.
My phone buzzed with Santos' update from thirty minutes ago.
She’s safe. Minimal conversation. Refusing to take much.
I set the phone down, unsurprised. What else would I expect from a woman who'd spent years as the centerpiece in her father's collection? Darzi had displayed her like fine art—to be admired but never touched.
A manila folder lay open before me. Crime scene photos without the crime.
Staff records with conspicuous gaps. Security rotations that changed without pattern.
Women whose employment histories ended abruptly, as if redacted from existence.
Guards hired from agencies that existed only on paper, bound by confidentiality agreements that would make government officials blanch.
How had she survived it? Walking those halls each day knowing one misstep would trigger a minefield.
I pushed back from my desk and stood. Three years ago, I wouldn't have given the Darzi family a second thought.
His attempt to bring me into his circle with business proposals had been laughable.
His offers of alliance—transparent attempts to leverage my family's resources for his own failing empire.
Then I'd seen her for the first time in a long while. She’d been standing at her father's side during the Aethelwald auction, her spine straight, eyes downcast, the perfect daughter in the perfect dress. It wasn't pity. Pity had no place in my world.
I'd made inquiries after that, making sure some got back to Darius.
I found out more about Selene Darzi than she probably knew about herself.
Her education, her talents, her isolation.
The men her father had considered for her hand.
How many of them had accidentally bumped into her at charity galas or coincidentally occupied the neighboring table at restaurants where she was forced to dine with her father's mistresses.
They'd all seen the prize. None of them had the nerve to claim it because her father threw more weight around than he truly possesed.
I'd agreed to dinner with Selene because I recognized the perfect opportunity when it presented itself. Her father, desperate to shore up his crumbling empire—had offered me exactly what I needed to position myself for what came next in Dominion politics. A beautiful, untainted bride with a pedigree that would legitimize my presence at the highest tables moving forward. On her end she’d handle the women’s social circle, our home, and one day our children.
The engagement announcement had gone out early and already sent shockwaves through Dominion society. Men who'd been curious about Selene for years would now face her across ballrooms and Dominion functions, forced to acknowledge that she belonged to me.
My decision to break off my previous engagement had been the right one. Danielle had been and utterly wrong for what I needed. Selene was different. She'd looked at me across that dinner table at Azure deciding whether I'd be her salvation or just another form of imprisonment.
She still wasn't sure.
I could see it in the careful distance she maintained during breakfast that morning and when we ate dinner together the night before, the way she weighed each word before speaking it.
But she'd said yes. She'd let me kiss her—in the garden.
She'd allowed herself to be moved from one cage to another.
She slept under my roof, doors down from my room.
Sleep had abandoned me at 3 AM. I'd stared at the ceiling, hyperaware of her proximity. Near enough that I could trace the path to her door in my mind, yet distant enough to maintain an illusion of independence.
My sudden fixation burned through me like a fever that would only break when I possessed every inch of her—not just the curve of her neck where my teeth would leave marks of ownership, but the very marrow of her being until she forgot her own name and knew only mine.
I'd spent years surrounding myself with constant distraction to avoid confronting my own hollowness.
The intercom's harsh buzz pulled me back to reality.
"Sir," came Trevor's voice, " Ms. Rousseau has arrived." My security chief's tone carried the slightest note of warning.
I exhaled slowly. I knew this was coming. “Send her up.”
It took nearly ten minutes before there was a delicate knock, and Danielle appeared in my doorway, her composure as carefully arranged as her outfit. A flush colored her cheeks, whether from anger or faux heartbreak, I couldn't tell.
"I had to hear about your engagement from someone else," she remarked, her voice soft.
"Many people had to learn about my engagement from someone else."
"But I’m not people," she countered, brow creasing.
"Of course, you are."
She inhaled slowly, then moved deeper into the room. "Then it's happening? This marriage to her?"
"Her name is Selene."
Her eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly, a flash of something cold and calculating behind her perfect composure returned. "So this girl means that much to you already?"
"Selene was inevitable from the first moment I met her,” I emphasized her name once again.
The corner of her mouth twitched downward before she could catch it. She studied me, silent and assessing. Then her voice dropped to a register she'd perfected years ago, the one that made men lean closer when they didn’t know any better.
"What about us? Our friendship?"
I sat back behind my desk. "Danielle—."
"Over twenty years, Alaric." A crack appeared in her composure, something raw bleeding through. "We've been in each other's lives since we were children. That has to count for something."
“Selene stands on her own merit. She isn't filling a vacancy. You will always be a friend."
Her eyes filled with hope that extinguished when I continued.
"The constant messages, the calls at all hours, however, that ends today."
Her lips parted, the perfect oval of surprise. For a moment, something else unguarded crossed her features before the mask reassembled itself.
"I should offer my congratulations, then."
"Consider them received," I replied, cool and final.
Her gaze held mine, and I allowed myself one last look at what had once captivated me.
The camera flashes had always loved her.
Sun-kissed complexion, the golden cascade of hair that seemed to arrange itself by divine right, those lips that could reshape kindness into manipulation between breaths.
Danielle Rousseau was keenly conscious of her market value.
With Selene, beauty operated by different laws.
Danielle commanded attention like a spotlight; Selene drew it like gravity.
Her presence wasn't crafted for society pages or masquerading galas, it infiltrated the senses without permission, a quiet intensity that silenced conversations rather than dominating them, lingering in memory long after she'd gone.
Danielle thrived in a world that consumed everything it touched; Selene belonged to one that survived what tried to consume it.
The tedium of measuring one woman against another quickly lost its hold on me.
My feelings for Danielle had faded to nothing long before I officially ended things over eight months ago. We'd been a transaction too, but one disguised as romance, her social capital for my public image, both of us performing for cameras and Dominion gossip columns until even that became a chore.
Other women had warmed my bed since her.
Never the one within these walls, but at the hotel chain a branch of my family owned.
None of those few women had enough influence to make headlines.
Looking at her now, I felt nothing but the courtesy you extend to someone who once occupied space in your life, and beneath that, the quiet satisfaction of a chapter finally closed.
She crossed her arms "When do I meet the bride-to-be?"
"You'll see her at functions, naturally. She'll be at my side."
Her smile stretched thin as parchment. "And is she... equipped for our circles?"
"More than equipped. She navigates them with more grace than those born to privilege."
Danielle's mouth opened slightly, hovering at the edge of indiscretion. "There's talk about her mother's—."
"History that will remain unmentioned. By anyone. Especially you,” I cut her off.
She flinched as though I'd struck her. Her gaze dropped to the floor. "I was only making conversation."
"No, you weren't, but we'll pretend you were just this once."
The vibration of my phone against the desk drew my attention to Trevor's new message. Incoming.
I didn’t have time to ask who or what before footsteps reached with a rapid approach. In my world, only one woman possessed that particular privilege, the right to enter unannounced. Well, two now with Selene moving in.
My mother materialized in the threshold, her eyes darting between Danielle and me before settling into a perfunctory smile.
"Alaric," she greeted me, lingering at the entrance as if she'd discovered a private theater scene in progress, "what an unexpected gathering."
She regarded Danielle with the same expression one reserved for examining expired merchandise still displayed on the shelf. They had gotten on well up until these past few years, and then my mother grew to dislike her more and more.
In Dominion, women maintained their own intricate power structure, like a shadow court running parallel to our visible one.
Men knew better than to interfere directly.
Our role was more subtle. A husband's treatment of his wife became the template for society's response.
Elevate her, and doors opened. Diminish her, and the hierarchy followed suit.
The mathematics of it all was brutally simple.
At the sight of my mother, Danielle's face reset like a dislocated bone snapping back into place, smile brightening, posture straightening.