Even now, I could hear my father’s harsh voice in the back of my mind.“Poise before protest, Selene. Always.”
7:30 glowed on my vanity clock.
With dinner at eight, I was already late by his standards—not actually late, just not early enough to demonstrate proper reverence. My fingers traced the black satin dress hugging my waist before falling in a calculated drape. Around my neck hungthe delicate gold chain, my mother’s last possession he hadn’t managed to erase.
When I stepped into the hallway, each heel strike echoed like a countdown. The Darzi estate absorbed all other sounds, as if wealth itself consumed noise—leaving nothing but electric hums and the soft electronic breathing of security systems embedded in the walls.
My father had bought the house from an old minister who’d vanished shortly after signing the deed. Sometimes I swore I could feel his ghost trailing me through these halls, his spectral hands reaching in outrage.
The staircase portraits tracked my movements with painted eyes, generations of men who’d crushed others beneath their heels and called the resulting height achievement.
My phone was tucked into my clutch, likely still warm from Amara’s call. She always checked in twice weekly from her private and secure line, though today she’d revealed that she knew about the dinner before I had. Her voice had blasted through the speaker with such force I’d winced and pulled the phone from my ear.
“Selene, if you let him auction you off like this, I swear to God!”
It was easy for her to scream revolution from far way. Had it slipped her notice that she’d escaped and I hadn’t? I didn’t get to rage and protest, not if I didn’t want to suffer for it and then be forced to endure anyways.
At the hallway’s end stood my father’s office, double doors already parted like a predator’s jaws. There he sat behind his mahogany fortress, surrounded by leather-bound ledgers that contained the lives he’d crushed and that perpetual crystal decanter, amber liquid catching the light like trapped fire.
“You kept me waiting.”
“I was getting ready.” The words felt small in my mouth.
He looked up then, and the air froze in my lungs. His gaze flayed me where I stood. “You’ve had your entire life to get ready. Tonight isn’t about you. It’s about what this family needs. You will sit across from Alaric Kostas and make him believe you are not just indispensable, but worth every bit of what I’m asking for you.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“There is nodoesn’t.” Each syllable was a hammer strike. “That’s what women in our world are for. Persuasion.” He rose and stalked toward me, each footfall a countdown to violence. “You know what will happen if you return without the promise of an engagement? Do you want so badly to go see your mother?”
I opened my mouth, but his hand shot forward, closing around my throat before I could form a word. His fingers pressed into the delicate skin beneath my jaw, thumb digging into the hollow above my collarbone. The pressure wasn’t enough to cut off my air completely, just enough to remind me how easily he could.
“All you need to say is yes, sir. You’ll come back to me the soon-to-be Mrs. Kostas, won’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” I managed with a whisper, the word vibrating against his palm.
His lips curled upward, pride in his own mercy evident in the fine lines at the corners of his eyes. “Good. Remember the consequences of disappointing me.”
As his grip fell away, my fingers twitched at my side, wanting to soothe the tender flesh where he’d held, but I refused to give him that satisfaction. The phantom sensation of his hand lingered like a collar.
At least he wouldn’t leave a mark, the twisted asshole. Not on the outside. You’d think I would be used to this by now, but there was always some small part of me—a foolish child’s heart buriedbeneath years of compliance that wished to understand why he seemed to loathe me.
The car is waiting,” he said, already turning back to his desk, dismissing me with a flick of his eyes. “Don’t embarrass us, Selene.”
I left without a word, my heels counting down the seconds of freedom with each step across marble floors. The estate doors closed behind me with a whisper of expensive hinges, releasing me into a night as black as spilled ink. Dion waited beside the luxury town car, cap clutched against his chest, his weathered face creased with a kindness that seemed contraband in my father’s world.
“Miss Darzi,” he nodded, swinging the door open.
“Dion,” I acknowledged, sliding onto leather seats that kissed my bare skin with cold formality.
The car glided forward without instruction. Erevale unfurled before us, the coastal city’s lights suspended like jewels against velvet darkness. In the rearview mirror, Dion’s gaze found mine.
“That dress suits you, Miss Selene.”
My lips curved slightly upward. “Thank you.”
I had no idea where we were going. I knew not to ask, and my father would never have explained, but the last place I was expecting to be taken wasAzure. Even from down the street, the restaurant gleamed with stories of blue-tinted glass that caught the downtown lights and transformed it into something ethereal. As we drew closer, I could see the famous waterfall wall cascading behind the glass façade, lit from within by gold-filtered lights.
The waitlist for this place stretched six months into the future, making me wonder just how long ago this meeting was planned, or if the Kostas name simply opened doors for tonight.