Billionaire of Lies & Diamonds (Ruthless Billionaires #7)

Chapter One The Perfect Life

The dress cost fourteen thousand dollars.

Zara Voss knew this not because she had paid for it — she hadn’t paid for anything in three years — but because she remembered the way Damien’s personal stylist, Margaux, had whispered the figure with reverent awe when she’d laid it across the bed that morning, smoothing the ivory silk with both palms as though touching something holy.

It was a Valentino. Off-shoulder. The kind of gown that didn’t ask a woman to be beautiful so much as it announced it on her behalf.

Zara stood before the floor-to-ceiling mirror in her dressing room and stared at the woman looking back at her.

She was beautiful. She knew that. It wasn’t vanity — it was simply a fact she had learned to hold the way one holds a degree certificate: evidence of something real, but not the whole story.

Her skin was deep brown and smooth, her cheekbones sharp enough to cast shadows, her dark eyes large and watchful beneath brows that always seemed to be deciding something.

The Valentino fell from her shoulders in a whisper of silk and pooled at her feet with practiced drama, and the diamond collar at her throat — six carats, princess-cut, a third anniversary gift she’d found on the breakfast tray one morning without a card — caught the vanity lights and scattered them across the walls like broken stars.

She looked like the wife of a billionaire.

She felt like a photograph of one.

“Ma’am.” Her housekeeper, Adaeze, appeared in the doorway holding a clutch the size of a paperback novel. Cream satin. Gold clasp. Also Valentino. “Mr. Voss’s driver is downstairs. He says ten minutes.”

“Tell him I’ll be ready in five.”

Adaeze nodded and disappeared with the silent efficiency that everyone in Damien Voss’s household had perfected over time — the ability to move through rooms without disturbing the air, to speak without filling space, to exist in the orbit of immense power without ever, ever getting too close to the sun.

Zara understood the instinct. She had married the sun.

The Voss penthouse occupied the top two floors of the Obsidian Tower on Victoria Island — forty-two rooms, three terraces overlooking Lagos Lagoon, a private elevator that opened directly into a marble foyer the size of a tennis court.

Damien had bought the building the year before they married, gutted the top floors entirely, and rebuilt them to specifications so exacting that the architect had quit twice before the project was finished.

The result was breathtaking: a home that felt simultaneously like an art installation and a fortress, all dark stone and glass and carefully curated silence.

It was the kind of home that made guests pause at the threshold and exhale slowly, as if entering a museum.

Zara had done that once, on the first night Damien brought her here.

She’d stood in the foyer, looked up at the twenty-foot ceilings and the statement chandelier — three hundred hand-blown glass spheres suspended at different heights, casting warm amber light across the stone floors — and thought: this is too beautiful to live in.

She’d said it aloud, which in retrospect had probably been the most honest thing she’d said in years.

Damien had smiled at her then, a rare, private smile that lived only at the very corner of his mouth and never reached the press. “That’s why I need you in it,” he’d said. “So it knows what beauty actually looks like.”

She had been twenty-six. She had believed him completely.

The car arrived at the Eko Atlantic Grand Hotel at seven fifty-three, which meant Damien was seven minutes ahead of his scheduled arrival — a fact that would be noted and appreciated by the forty-odd business associates, board members, and political contacts already inside the ballroom.

Damien Voss did not keep people waiting. This was not courtesy. It was control.

He stepped out of the Maybach first, as always.

Six foot three, built like a man who treated his body as another asset to be maintained at peak performance, dressed in a black Brioni tuxedo that had been made for him specifically — no off-the-rack anything, ever, in any area of his life.

His face was the kind that photographers loved and rivals feared: angular, dark, arranged in a habitual expression of composed authority that could shift, in the space of a breath, into something altogether colder.

He was thirty-four years old and had been the most powerful private businessman in West Africa for the past six of them, and he wore that fact the way he wore the tuxedo — like it had been tailored to fit him exactly.

He extended his hand back into the car without looking.

Zara took it and stepped out beside him.

There was a ripple through the waiting cluster of photographers near the entrance — not the explosive frenzy of tabloid chaos, but the controlled, reverent click-and-flash of society press who knew better than to shout or push.

Damien and Zara Voss did not respond well to shouting or pushing.

Everyone within the Lagos elite sphere had learned this.

Zara felt the cameras find her and held herself still, one hand in Damien’s, the other resting lightly at her hip, and let the diamonds do what they were designed to do.

She tilted her chin up a fraction — not arrogance, just the particular geometry of a woman who had learned that confidence was armor, and armor had to fit correctly to work.

Damien’s thumb moved once, briefly, across her knuckles.

It was the most he had touched her in four days.

Inside, the ballroom had been transformed into something from a dream or a fever — white orchids banked against every surface, the scent of them thick and sweet in the air-conditioned cool, tables dressed in midnight blue linen with gold centerpieces that caught candlelight and threw it back doubled.

This was the annual Voss Foundation Gala, and Damien’s team ran it with the same precision they applied to hostile takeovers: nothing left to chance, every detail engineered for maximum effect.

Five hundred of Lagos’s most powerful people moved through the room in their finery, and Zara moved among them with the ease of a woman born to this.

She hadn’t been — she’d grown up middle-class in Lekki, the daughter of an engineer and a schoolteacher, scholarship-educated, hard-working, practical.

But three years inside Damien’s world had taught her its language, its rhythms, its unspoken hierarchies.

She could place a person’s precise net worth within the first minute of meeting them simply by how they held their glass.

“Zara.” The voice came from her left, warm and immediate, threading through the crowd like a familiar song. “You look absolutely devastating.”

Celeste Moore materialized from between two broad-shouldered men in identical grey tuxedos and pulled Zara into a hug that smelled of Chanel No.

5 and red wine. She was stunning — honey-toned, long-limbed, dressed in a backless crimson gown that turned heads every time she crossed a room, which she knew and used with cheerful shamelessness.

She had been Zara’s best friend since university: the woman who had held her through her mother’s illness, talked her down from a hundred ledges, stood beside her at the altar with genuine tears streaming down her face.

Zara loved her the way you love someone who has seen you at your most destroyed and stayed anyway.

“I was wondering where you’d gotten to,” Zara said, squeezing her hands. “I texted you twice.”

“I know, I’m terrible.” Celeste laughed, a bright, effervescent sound that made the men nearby glance over reflexively.

“I was stuck with the Adekunle table — you know how Chief Adekunle gets when he’s had champagne.

He told me the story about the 1998 oil crisis twice.

” She leaned in conspiratorially, her eyes scanning the room with an expression Zara would later revisit and reinterpret completely. “Where’s the man?”

“Working the room.” Zara nodded slightly toward the far end of the ballroom, where Damien stood in a tight cluster of men with the body language of people deciding things.

He had a glass of water in his hand — never alcohol at public events — and he was listening rather than speaking, which, with Damien, was always the more dangerous mode.

Celeste’s gaze lingered on him a beat too long.

Zara noticed it the way you notice a door slightly ajar in a room that should be locked: quickly, and then immediately explained away.

An hour later, Zara slipped away from the table where Celeste was performing for the benefit of two junior ministers and their fascinated wives, and made her way toward the terrace.

The night air was warm and salt-touched, the lagoon spread out below in shifting black silk, the distant lights of the mainland smearing the horizon amber and gold.

She pressed her palms against the balustrade and breathed.

Beneath the diamonds and the silk and the practiced composure, her body carried a secret that was eleven weeks old.

She had not told Damien yet.

This was the part she couldn’t explain cleanly, even to herself.

She wanted the child — had wanted one for over a year, quietly, with the ache of wanting something you’re not sure you’re allowed to ask for.

But Damien had been distant lately in a way that had a texture to it, a weight, as though some calculation was occurring behind his eyes that she wasn’t privy to.

He came to bed late and left early. His responses to her had become efficient where they had once been — not warm exactly, Damien was never simply warm — but present.

Attentive. As though she had mattered to whatever equation he was running.

She had decided to tell him tonight, after the gala.

She pressed one hand, briefly, to her stomach. Then she straightened, smoothed the Valentino, and turned to go back inside.

She didn’t see the heel of her stiletto catch the slight ridge where the terrace tiles met the ballroom’s marble threshold.

The fall happened in the space between one breath and the next — a sudden, catastrophic loss of balance, her arms reaching for nothing, the cold marble rising to meet her with indifferent force.

She heard herself cry out, a sharp, involuntary sound, and then the impact — shoulder, hip, the terrible crack of her head against the edge of a stone planter — and then a roaring silence that swallowed the music and the voices and the clinking of crystal.

Then pain. White and total.

She lay on the marble floor of the ballroom threshold, people already converging, voices rising, someone calling for a doctor, and she thought — through the ringing haze of shock and agony — only one thing:

The baby.

She reached for Damien’s name but couldn’t find her voice. The chandelier above swam in her blurring vision, three hundred amber spheres spinning gently, beautifully, as the world narrowed to a point and went dark.

Somewhere behind her, unseen, Celeste Moore stood very still.

And did not call for help.

And smiled — the smallest, most private smile — before rearranging her face into the correct expression of horror and pushing forward through the crowd, crying, “Zara! Oh God — Zara!” with hands outstretched and eyes perfectly, brilliantly wet.