Chapter Thirty One

Amihan was waiting for him at the door. She had not gone to bed. Of course she hadn't. She'd been standing there, or near there, moving between the window and the doorway with the restless energy of a woman who knows something is wrong and has been forbidden, temporarily, from doing anything about it. The moment she saw Santos's face — the careful, measured expression of a man carrying someone else's news — she crossed her arms and set her jaw."What did she say?" Amihan demanded. Her eyes were sharp, her voice pitched low but urgent. "Her boyfriend did something, didn't he? I knew that man was no good for her. The very first time I saw him I knew."I should have said something, she thought. I saw it. That particular way he looked at her — or rather, the way he didn't. Like she was a presence he'd grown accustomed to rather than a person he'd chosen. I saw it and I said nothing because it wasn't my place and Maya was happy and I didn't want to be the one to—"It's not just him." Sa

Chapter Thirty Two

Roderick stopped five feet from the desk — he had learned, over five years, to read the landscape before advancing further. "Um... It's yours, sir." He cleared his throat. "Your mother ordered me to pick it up for you."Of course she did.Alessandro leaned back in his chair. The leather sighed beneath him. "How long have you been working for me, Rod?""Um. Five years.""Five years." He let that sit. "And in all that time — five years of working in very close proximity to my person — have you ever, even once, seen me wearing something like that?" He gestured toward the tuxedo with an expression that would have been appropriate for something found on the underside of a shoe."No, sir.""Then why," Alessandro said, with the patience of a man who was not feeling particularly patient, "did you not tell her how hideous it is?"Rod blinked. Once. Twice. He looked down at the tuxedo on his arm as though he was only now truly seeing it. "I... She asked me what your favourite colour is."Alessa

Chapter Thirty Three

"I won't pay you back in any other way except cash or transfer, Mother." He snapped, the pleasantness of a moment ago entirely gone. "You should look for your puppet elsewhere.""I want you to take Viviana Geralt as your date to the anniversary." She said it calmly. Infuriatingly, serenely calm — as though he hadn't spoken at all, as though his refusal was simply atmospheric noise she had chosen not to register.Alessandro stared at the phone on his desk. For a full, suspended second, the name simply sat in the air of his office, and his mind — sharp, efficient, accustomed to processing bad news with the detached precision of a man who ran a billion-dollar enterprise — flatly refused to accept it.Viviana Geralt."Over my dead, worm-infested body, Mother!" The words left him before he could architect them into something cooler, something more controlled. He heard himself bellow and distantly recognized that she had done it again — cracked him open in under sixty seconds, stripped awa

Chapter Thirty Four

The familiar scent of makeup remover filled the small bathroom as Maya dragged a cotton pad across her cheek, watching the day dissolve onto the white cloth in streaks of foundation and mascara.It had been a long evening at her parents' restaurant — the kind that left her feet aching and her smile muscles sore — and the quiet of her room was a relief she hadn't realised she'd needed until she was standing in it.Almost done, she thought, reaching for a fresh napkin. Then bed.That was when she heard it.The soft but distinct sound of her bedroom door swinging open — and then clicking shut. No footsteps followed. No voice called out. Just silence, thick and deliberate, pressing against the walls.Maya's brows furrowed. She stood still for a moment, head tilted, listening. The room didn't creak or settle in ways she hadn't learned to recognise over the years. That sound was something else entirely. Someone else.Someone's in my room.She tossed the napkin into the waste bin beneath the

Chapter Thirty Five

The name hit Kelay like a slap. For a beat she said nothing, her eyes narrowing slowly into slits as something cold and unsurprised settled in her chest. I knew it. I said it years ago and nobody wanted to listen. She had never been able to put her finger on exactly what it was about Maddie — something in the way she'd always looked at Eric when she thought Maya wasn't watching, something in the particular sweetness she performed whenever Maya was in the room. Kelay had filed it away and said nothing, because Maya had loved her, and who was she to plant seeds of doubt in her cousin's happiest season?She wished now that she had."I knew it." The words came out low, almost a hiss. "I knew she was not to be trusted." Something hotter pushed through and she let it. "That frigging bitch!""It's what it is." Maya lifted one shoulder in a shrug so practiced it almost looked real.Don't do that. Kelay watched her — the set of her jaw, the careful blankness behind her eyes — and felt a quie

Chapter Thirty Six

There were very few people or things that made Alessandro Guidotti nervous.His father was one of them.Giovanni Guidotti had a particular way of occupying a room — not loudly, not theatrically — but with the quiet, immovable authority of a man who had never once doubted his own significance. Alessandro had spent the better part of twenty-one years learning how to breathe normally in his presence. He was still learning.But tonight, it was not his father making his pulse unsteady.Tonight, it was her.Viviana.The name alone did something unflattering to his composure. He sat rigid in the back of the car, dressed in a custom-tailored black tuxedo that fit him like a second skin, and felt, with some private humiliation, like a sacrificial lamb being chauffeured to the slaughter. The bowtie at his throat was immaculate. It was also strangling him.It feels like a noose, he thought grimly, resisting the urge — for the fourth time since leaving the estate — to reach up and tear the thin