🥀Chapter 06🥀

The shouting woke her up before she was even fully conscious.

Selene slowly drifted out of sleep, the way she always did in this house. This room was usually so thick with quiet that any noise from the outside world felt totally out of place. She lay still for a second, listening closely, trying to figure out if the yelling was real or just the end of a bad dream.

Then she heard her dad's voice.

It was distinct and unmistakable. It cut right through the morning air with that kind of pitch Victor used when he decided that being loud was the same thing as being in charge.

She pulled her sleep mask off.

Grey morning light filled the room, looking soft. It was like a peaceful morning that had no idea what was about to happen to it.

She grabbed her phone off the nightstand.

9:47 a.m.

She sat up, swung her legs over the edge of the bed, and slid her feet into her slippers. She walked out of the room with her eyes still heavy, struggling to blink away the sleep.

----

The Estate sat on the quiet edge of the city. It was her grandpa Edmund's gift to her on her twentieth birthday. He had handed it over with that classic calm of his, wrapping his deepest intentions in simple gestures and never explaining them fully. Yours, he had said, dropping the key into her palm.. No strings attached.

She understood later what "no strings attached" really meant in a family like theirs.

It meant nobody else could touch it.

She was the only one who lived here. The yard was always taken care of, and the rooms were full of sunlight, and a peacefulness that came from being genuinely loved over time. It was the one single corner of her life that Victor had never been able to break into and mess up.

She walked down the long driveway in her oversized cream pajamas, her hair a total mess from last night, and her sleep mask pushed up onto her forehead. She yawned into the cool morning air. The breeze blew through the trees lining the drive, pressing the soft fabric of her pajamas against her. For about thirty peaceful seconds, she was just a normal woman walking toward her gate on a quiet morning.

Then she saw them.

Victor was at the gate. He was wearing yesterday's suit, or one that looked exactly like it. His face was totally flushed, and one of his hands was gripping the iron bars like he wanted to rip them apart with his bare hands. His other hand was jabbing the air right in front of her security guard, who was standing his ground with a super tense face, trying to do his job under awful conditions.

The security guard's lip was bleeding.

Selene's sleepiness instantly evaporated.

She ran across the rest of the driveway, punched in the gate code, and pushed through the bars. She stepped right between her father and her guard quickly, reacting before her brain could even fully think it through.

"What," she said, "is going on right now?"

Victor spun around to face her. He was breathing hard, that specific breathlessness that happens when your rage completely outpaces your control. He took one look at her, fixed his jacket with two tugs, and pointed at her.

His finger stopped just two inches from her face.

"You told your security not to let me in." His voice was low now. A controlled fury was always much quieter than loud screaming with Victor. "Your own father. You actually had the nerve to tell your staff to keep me off this property like I'm some random stranger off the street."

Selene crossed her arms.

"Is there," she said politely, "a problem with that?"

Victor's jaw tightened up. Something dark flashed behind his eyes and vanished. He took a step toward her and raised his hand.

The air felt like it completely stopped.

His hand just hung there between them for one long, frozen second that felt way longer than a second.

Then he lowered it.

Selene hadn't flinched or stepped back. She hadn't changed her expression at all, just looking right at him with the same blank face she'd had since she walked through the gate.

Victor fixed his cufflinks, first one side, then the other. It was his little ritual for rebuilding his composure from the outside in.

"You will accept Reginald's proposal," he said, his voice quiet. It was the tone he used for things he considered already a done deal. "And you will," he paused, acting like his next words were completely normal, "record an apology. On video. Make it personal, and send it directly to him for the way you spoke to him last night in front of me."

Selene stared at him.

Then she laughed out loud.

It wasn't a polite laugh or a fake party laugh. It was a real one, filled with all the disbelief she had been holding back since their conversation in the garden.

"An apology video," she said.

"I am not joking with you, Selene."

"To Reginald Fitch." She said the name carefully, like she was making sure they were talking about the same person. "You want me to record a personal apology video to the man you tried to sell me to last night. At my own birthday party. Without me knowing anything about it." She tilted her head. "That's really why you drove all the way here at nine in the morning?"

"I'm warning you...."

"And I see it now," she said, her voice shifting. It was still calm, the truth that had been sitting in her brain since last night and finally decided to come out. "This was never about me finding a good husband. This was never about my happiness, my future, or any of the things normal fathers are supposed to care about." She looked right at him. "Fitch has something you want. A merger. A business deal. A connection you can't get without offering him something he actually desires." She paused. "And what he wanted was me."

Victor's face didn't crack, but something around his eyes tightened just a tiny bit.

"You have twenty-four hours," he said. "Marry him. Send the video. Or you will see a side of me you have spent your entire life being protected from." He straightened his shoulders and buttoned his jacket, fully putting his professional mask back on. "I am not making suggestions, Selene. I am telling you how this is going to end."

Selene looked right at him.

"I'd love to see it," she said quietly. "That other side. Bring it on."

Victor stared at her for one long, intense moment.

Then he turned around, walked to his car, and got inside. The door shut with a loud bang.

The car pulled away from the gate, the gate area went completely quiet again.

Selene stood on the concrete there for a moment, she let out a breath through her nose and turned to her security guard.

He was standing perfectly straight and professional. The blood at the corner of his mouth was small but totally visible in the morning light.

"Are you okay?" she asked. The other tone she used on her father was completely gone.

"Yes, ma'am." He gave a quick nod.

"I'm asking for real, not just to be polite." She looked right at his face. "Do you need to go to the hospital?"

"No, ma'am. I'm fine. Seriously."

She stared at him for a second longer, making it clear she was actually checking on him rather than just saying the words, then she nodded.

"You'll get extra money for this morning," she said. "That should have never happened on my property. I'm sorry."

He blinked, looking a little surprised by the apology, usually, rich people in her position didn't care enough to say sorry...and nodded again. "Thank you, ma'am."

She turned back toward the gate.

Twenty-four hours.

She knew, with clarity that comes after sleeping on a terrible situation, that her dad was not the type of guy to make a twenty-four-hour threat just for drama. He was a man who set deadlines because he had already planned exactly what he would do when the timer ran out.

Which meant she needed Finn Leighton to stop thinking about it and give her an answer right now.

Her phone buzzed.

She pulled it out of her pajama pocket and looked down at the screen.

Her heart did something it had absolutely no business doing at 9:52 on a Tuesday morning.