All Chapters of The Don's Unwanted Prize : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

“Stop breathing so loudly, boy,” Aunt Gable snapped, her voice ringing out sharp and cold. “You sound like a dying horse.”I flinched, my fingers digging into the polished mahogany of the banister. The rail felt like ice against my palms. I didn’t turn to look at her; I couldn’t. If I moved my head too fast, the world tilted, a dizzying roundabout of grey and black. “I’m trying,” I managed to croak. My throat was a desert. The detox had moved from the shivering stage to a dull, relentless throb in my bones. Every nerve ending felt raw, as if the skin had been peeled back to expose the wire. “Try harder,” she said, stepping into my sight. She looked like a queen of a forgotten era: emerald velvet, sharp silver hair, and eyes that saw through the ‘Vane Masterpiece’ suit I was wearing. She reached out and adjusted me with a jerk. “You are a De Santis by birth, but tonight, you are a Vane by necessity. The North Side doesn’t value your trauma, Luca. They value your composure. If you trem

The first dawn of the war was grey, and cold. I stood by the window of the suite, watching the light crawl across the choppy surface of Lake Michigan. Behind me, the steady, rhythmic hiss-click of the oxygen concentrator was the only heartbeat this house needed.  I turned my head slightly. Luca was a pale indentation in the charcoal sheets, his chest rising and falling in a dance dictated by the machine. He looked small.  “The doctor says his vitals are holding,” Aunt Gable’s voice came from the doorway. She was dressed in a maroon silk, her eyes tracking the IV line running into Luca’s bruised arm. “But the Board is calling, Silas. They saw him fall. They want to know if the alliance is a sinking ship.&rdquo

I stood in the centre of the room, my feet sinking into a rug that felt like it was woven from the clouds themselves. It was soft. Too soft. Where I’m from, floors were hard, cracked tiles, or wood that groaned if you put a pound of weight on it. In the South, you wanted the floor to speak to you; you wanted to know if someone was coming. Here, the silence was a weight, a thick, suffocating one that seemed designed to swallow a person whole. I didn’t move for a long time. I just breathed, feeling the clean, filtered air of the North burn in my lungs. It didn’t smell like the docks. It didn’t smell like the metallic tang of blood or the sour, fermented scent of my father’s brandy. It smelled of nothing. Or perhaps, it smelled of money. I looked at my hands. They were trembling, a vibration that I couldn’t suppress, no matter how hard I clenched my fists. I wasn’t afraid of Elizabeth Gable, though the woman looked like she had been carved out of ice, and I wasn’t afraid of Silas Vane.

The East Wing smelled of the faint, lingering citrus scent of the polish the cleaner used to mask the age of the wood and unused potential. It was a wing designed for guests who were meant to be seen and not heard. I had walked these floors for over thirty years, the architect of a dynasty that thrived on the art of being untouchable. But as I stood outside Tatiana De Santis’s suite, my hand hovering over the heavy oak door, the discipline felt like a corset that had been pulled one notch too tight. I had delayed the Beauforts’ arrival. Silas was still anchored to the master suite, drowning in his obsession with the boy they had broken, which left me to manage the other complication. I told myself it was a tactical necessity. We needed Tatiana to look the part of a ward, a polished jewel of the North, before we paraded her in front of the Board. But as I pushed the door open, I knew I was lying to myself. Tatiana was standing by the window. She had stripped off the scuffed boots a

For a few minutes, I just sat there in the dim blue light coming off the server, my breath rattling in my throat, sounding entirely too loud in the reinforced silence of the room. My skin still felt raw where her fingers had traced a slow, agonizing line down my arm. “He won’t find it,” her voice still echoed in my mind. Very cold and precise. “Because by the time he’s strong enough to walk down those stairs, Silas would have convinced him otherwise. And you, Tatiana… You’re going to help him believe it.”I touched my lower lip. It was swollen from her kiss. A kiss that now felt less like passion and more like a binding contract. She had looked at me with those ancient, pale eyes of hers and dropped the ultimate leverage: “I’ll show him your file. I’ll show him that his sister wasn’t a survivor. She was a witness who never said a word.” How dare she! Those words tore at the scars I tried so hard to hide. She knew. She knew that when our father was breaking Luca back in the South, I