Derrick chuckled. “Ah, my friend. You’ve got a soft spot already.”
“Soft isn’t the word either.”
He smirked. “Then what is?”
“Curious.”
Truthfully, that wasn’tallI was. I kept seeing her sitting across from me at that table, posture perfect, voice even, eyes that said far more than her words ever could.
Cassian spoke again, tone lighter. “You sound like a man who’s already made up his mind.”
“Hardly.” I reached for my neglected drink. “I’m curious. Not foolish.”
“After Danielle, you deserve to be,” Derrick agreed.
My brother raised his hand in protest. “We’ve established a moratorium on that name in this house.”
“Danielle and I had an understanding.”
“Sure,” Derrick droned. “Until she didn’tunderstandher place anymore.”
I smiled faintly. “That’s one way to put it.”
Danielle had been a walking business plan in six-inch heels. She'd known which cards to play and when, but our strategies never aligned. We functioned better as allies than as a merged corporation. I needed someone who saw the empire as ours, not hers, and played her role accordingly—and she needed someone who'd let her live the lifestyle without doing any of the work.
Selene wasn’t like that. She wasn’t playing the game at all but had all the skills to overtake it in the area I would need my wife to.
Cassian's voice cut through my thoughts once more. "When are you seeing her again?"
"Tonight. Dinner," I revealed, keeping my tone neutral.
"That's... quick," Derrick observed, eyebrows raised.
I met his gaze steadily. "I recognize an opportunity when I see one."
My brother studied me, all traces of amusement gone. "What's your endgame here, Alaric?"
My attention drifted to the window where afternoon light fractured. "Something authentic."
The silence stretched between us, heavy with unspoken understanding.
Derrick broke it with a low chuckle. "Damn. Poor woman doesn't know what's coming."
“She won’t see it coming because there’s nothing to see. I’m not planning an ambush,” I countered.
Cassian shot me a skeptical look, the kind that had irritated me since childhood. “You’re always planning something. It’s what makes you... you.”
My brother wasn’t wrong. Strategy was embedded in my DNA, each interaction a move on a board only I could fully see. But with Selene, the game already felt different. There was something about her that threaded itself under the skin. Not the way Danielle once had—with beauty and theatrics and a hunger for the stage lights—but with the opposite.
Not to say Selene wasn’t fucking gorgeous.
A man blind and deaf would be able to tell you that.
Her hair was a deep, cool brown that caught light like polished chestnut, falling in a silken cascade down her back. Her skin held the kind of warmth you couldn’t fake, sun-kissed with that faint gold undertone that made her look perpetually bathed in late afternoon light.
Her eyes—not just brown, but a complex topography of umber and sienna with flecks of copper near the pupils, were the kind that pulled you in slowly, revealing more the longer you stared. Not glassy or pleading like most women who’d tried to capture my attention; hers were observant, patient, too old for her age—28 to my 34. When they met mine across the white tablecloth, it felt less like being admired and more like being measured for a coffin.
Her frame carried the quiet athleticism of someone who’d been trained to control every movement—posture straight as ablade, shoulders set with deliberate poise, every motion elegant from the precise way she walked to the way she sat with her ankles crossed, never taking up too much space but somehow owning all of it, like a queen who needed no crown.