Prologue
Siobhan
* * *
There's a photograph on the nightstand. Not a wedding portrait — we didn't do those. It's a candid. Someone caught us in the garden, months after everything, after the world stopped trying to end us. Nico has his hand against the back of my neck, thumb at my jaw, and he's looking at me the way he looked at me that first night across the Elysium table. Like, I'm a problem he's already decided to keep.
I'm laughing. I don't remember what he said. It doesn't matter.
What matters is that I didn't see it coming. Any of it.
I walked into that meeting on a Tuesday in October because my brother Cormac called and said show up, so I showed up. I wore the gray dress because it was the first thing in my closet. I refused the chair they offered because I think better on my feet, and I never sit with my back to a door, not in rooms like that, not with men like those. I stood between Declan and Finn, and I read the room the way my father taught me — tracking the silences, the power dynamics, the gap between what men say and what their hands are doing while they say it.
I was not supposed to be the one he chose.
I knew it before he said my name. I saw the Greek woman in the dark dress — composed, expectant, seated beside her father with the particular stillness of someone who has been waiting for something so long the waiting has become a posture. I felt the room's assumption like the weather. I thought: there. That's who he'll choose. I started calculating what that alliance would mean for us, for my brothers, for the docks.
Then his eyes moved past her.
Gold eyes. I'd heard about them. Everyone had. Cold, people said. I thought: they're wrong. Cold means he doesn't care. What I saw across that table wasn't cold. It was calculating, which is so much worse, because calculating means he'd already run every scenario and landed on me specifically, and the landing was not an accident.
I had approximately four seconds to decide who I was going to be in that room.
I said I'd do it. On my terms.
I want to tell you I was brave. I want to say I saw the shape of what we'd become and walked toward it clearly, eyes open, no fear. That would be a cleaner story. The truth is messier: I was furious and calculating and a little terrified, and I said yes anyway because the alternative was watching the men in that room make the decision for me, and I have never in my life let a man decide what I'm worth.
My father's voice came through the prison line and saidsmart match, she'll do it, and I felt the rage move through me like a tide.
I did it anyway. On my terms.
What I didn't know — what I couldn't have known, standing in that room with my spine straight and my brothers at my back — was what it would cost me. Not the danger. Not the war. Not the blood that came later.
The door.
There's a door in his penthouse, and on one side of it is the woman I was when I walked into that meeting, and on the other side is everything that comes after.
I know which side I'm on now.
I didn't see that coming either.
Contents
Content Warnings
Playlist
1.Nico
Blood On The Table
2.Siobhan
Chosen
3.Nico
Terms