BILLIONAIRE'S BETRAYAL & HARD GROVEL (Empire of Secrets #2)

PROLOGUE

POV: Vivienne

The key stuck the way it always did.

I twisted harder. Metal scraped. The lock finally gave with a soft, reluctant click.

I pushed.

The door swung open too easily.

No resistance. No familiar drag of the swollen wood against the frame. Just air. Cold, damp coastal air that should not have been inside.

My hand stayed on the handle.

Something isn’t right.

I stepped across the threshold. The concrete floor was colder than it should have been. My boots made no sound. The studio was never this quiet. Even empty it used to hum—kiln ticking as it cooled, soft settling of clay on shelves, the distant crash of waves against the cliff.

Today there was nothing.

I flipped the light switch.

Nothing happened.

Dawn light leaked through the floor-to-ceiling windows in thin gray blades. Enough to see.

Enough to destroy me.

Every shelf was empty.

Not rearranged. Not moved.

Gone.

I took one step. Then another. Clay dust puffed up around my ankles like smoke. My eyes adjusted slowly, unwillingly.

Shards.

Everywhere.

Matte black clay I had spent three months burnishing until it felt like skin.

Pale porcelain vessels so thin the light used to pass through them.

The tall, twisted forms I called Spine and Silence and The Things I Never Said.

All of them reduced to jagged pieces scattered across the floor like broken teeth.

I walked farther in.

My foot landed on something soft and wrong. I looked down.

The half-finished piece.

Quiet Wife.

I had shaped her over six careful weeks. The slight tilt of the head. The hands folded in the lap. The mouth that never opened. She was supposed to be the center of the next collection. The one I never told Cassian about because he never asked.

She was ground into dust under someone’s boot. Only the base remained, cracked clean through the middle.

I couldn’t make a sound.

My chest locked.

I turned in a slow circle. The kiln door hung open like a broken jaw, black interior still smelling of the last firing. Tools were gone from the wall. The wedging table was overturned. Bags of clay slit open, their soft gray contents spilled and ground into the concrete.

And on the far wall, in thick red paint that still dripped in long, slow tears:

You were never meant to be seen.

The words blurred.

I blinked. Tears made them worse.

My knees hit the floor before I realized I was falling. Clay dust coated my palms instantly, fine and dry and permanent. It got under my nails the way it always did when I worked, except this time I hadn’t touched a single piece.

I couldn’t breathe.

Air came in short, useless gasps. My lungs refused to expand. The room tilted. The gray light through the windows turned watery.

Seven years.

Seven years of driving this road only when his calendar allowed it. Seven years of unlocking this door and working until my hands cracked and bled, then locking it again and returning to the glass house in the city where no one ever asked what I had made.

He built this place for me.

Wedding gift.

Floor-to-ceiling windows so I could watch the Pacific while I worked. A top-of-the-line kiln. Every tool I could name. He had stood in the empty space the day he gave me the key and said, “This is yours. Whatever you need.”

Then he never came back.

Not once.

I had told myself it didn’t matter. That love could be grown slowly, the way clay softens under patient hands. That if I stayed smooth, stayed quiet, stayed useful, one day he would walk through this door and actually look.

I was so stupid.

A broken laugh tried to escape my throat and died. The sound that came out was closer to a sob.

I crawled forward on my hands and knees. Shards cut through my jeans. I didn’t feel them. I reached for a curved fragment of what used to be a tall black vessel—one of the first pieces I ever fired in this kiln. The edge was sharp. It sliced my fingertip. Blood welled, bright against the gray dust.

I stared at it.

My blood on the floor of the only place that had ever felt like mine.

The message on the wall kept dripping.

You were never meant to be seen.

Someone had stood in this room and decided my work was nothing. Someone had taken the quiet, private language I spoke only here and smashed it into silence.

My phone was in my coat pocket. I should call someone. Security. The police. Cassian.

The thought of his name made my stomach turn.

He wouldn’t understand. He would send people. He would turn it into a problem to be managed, another line item on a schedule already too full. He would never feel the way the dust coated the back of my throat or the way the empty shelves looked like open mouths.

I pressed both hands flat to the concrete and tried to stand.

My legs shook. The room swam. I made it to my knees and stayed there, head bowed, breath coming in broken pulls.

Three weeks.

I had not been here in three weeks because Cassian needed me for the Tokyo investors, then the board dinner, then the charity gala for the children’s hospital. I had smiled and planned and made sure every detail was perfect while this place sat alone on the cliff, waiting.

And someone had come.

Someone had known exactly how long it would be empty.

A floorboard creaked behind me.

The sound was soft. Deliberate.

My entire body locked.

I stopped breathing.

Slowly—so slowly—I turned my head.

The doorway was no longer empty.

A shadow stood there, backlit by the gray morning, filling the entire frame. Too tall. Too still. The edges of a hood blurred the face into nothing.

My heart slammed once, hard enough to hurt, then began racing so fast the edges of my vision pulsed.

I opened my mouth.

No sound came out.

The shadow moved.

One step forward.

Into my studio.

Into the only place that had ever belonged to me.

And the panic that had been building since the key turned in the lock finally exploded—white and total and absolute—as the figure reached for the door and pulled it shut behind him.