The sky was gray the day I left the hospital.
I finished the discharge paperwork and had barely stepped through the front entrance when I saw a row of cars idling at the curb. Black sedans, windows tinted, engines purring low.
"Viv, over here!"
It was them.
My oldest friends. The ones I'd grown up with, the inner circle I'd known since before any of us understood what family names meant in this world.
The moment I saw their faces, something inside me thawed. Just barely. Just enough to remind me I was still capable of feeling warmth.
That evening, they took me to our usual place. A private lounge bar tucked behind an unmarked door on the Lower East Side, the kind of establishment where the bartender knew your drink before you sat down and the music never climbed above a murmur.
They said we were celebrating. My liberation. My freedom.
"Good riddance. A man like that never deserved you."
"Our Viv has the face, the figure, the bloodline. Now that you're free of him, the line of men waiting for you would stretch across the Atlantic."
"Tomorrow I'm introducing you to at least three prospects. Every single one a hundred times better than that cold-blooded bastard."
They talked over each other, teasing, laughing, filling the silence I'd carried for five years with something that almost felt like joy.
I sipped my drink and couldn't help but smile.
It had been so long since anything felt this light.
They were right. Why had I spent all those years destroying myself over a man who never loved me?
I excused myself and went to the restroom.
When I came back, the booth was empty.
Every single one of them, gone.
I froze. Then I grabbed a passing server by the arm. "My friends. Where are they?"
The young man's expression turned uneasy. He glanced toward the far end of the corridor, where a heavy door led to the private rooms.
"A woman came in. She'd been drinking. Said she wanted to order company for the evening, looked around the main floor, wasn't satisfied with anyone she saw. Then she spotted your group." He swallowed. "She had her people escort them into the back room. There were a lot of bodyguards with her. We didn't dare intervene."
My stomach dropped like a stone into black water.
Something was wrong.
My friends weren't ordinary people. They came from families with standing, with connections, with names that carried weight in every circle that mattered. No one would dare handle them like that.
Unless they already knew exactly who they were handling.
The realization crashed over me like ice water.
I was nearly running by the time I reached the door at the end of the hall. I shoved it open with both hands.
And there she was.
Serena Valenti.
She was drunk. Heavily, sloppily drunk, her designer dress slipping off one shoulder, her fingers wrapped around the wrist of one of my closest friends. She was pulling him toward her, pressing his hand against herself.
His face was rigid with barely contained disgust, but he was holding back. He knew what she was. He knew who stood behind her.
"Serena, let him go!"
I crossed the room in three strides and wrenched them apart.
That was when the door exploded inward behind me.
He had arrived.
Dominic Ashford.
His face was carved from something colder than marble. The temperature in the room seemed to plummet the instant he stepped through the threshold. Two enforcers flanked him like shadows, but it was his presence alone that made every person in the room go still.
He seized Serena's wrist, his voice low and laced with barely restrained fury. "What are you doing in a place like this?"
She yanked free of his grip, her eyes glassy and unfocused, and jabbed a finger toward my friends.
"I came to find some company for the evening. Can't you see that? These ones caught my eye. I want them to stay with me."
"Enough. No." His tone dropped to something frigid and final. He reached for her again.
She shoved him back. Hard. And then the tears came, sudden and theatrical, spilling down her cheeks.
"You can smile at other women. You can spend hours locked in your study with some female associate, and I'm supposed to just accept it. But I can't have a little fun?"
His attendant stepped forward quickly, voice careful and measured. "Miss Valenti, that was a business meeting with an allied family's representative. There was nothing inappropriate about it."
"I don't care!"
She wasn't listening. She lunged for my friend again, grabbing at his jacket.
"You're allowed to do whatever you want. So I get to do what I want too!"
I couldn't take another second of it.
I stepped directly between her and my friends, my body a wall.
"Enough! Whatever is between the two of you is your business. But you do not get to harass my friends."
Only then did his gaze shift to me.
Those dark eyes moved from my face to the group standing behind me. Something in his expression changed. It didn't soften. It calcified. It became something terrible.
"Vivienne." His voice was quiet in a way that promised violence. "I warned you not to scheme against her. Wasn't ruining yourself enough? Now you send your little circle to seduce her?"
I stood there, stunned into absolute stillness.
Seduce.
He said seduce.
"Dominic, are you blind?" My voice came out raw and shaking. "She is the one harassing them!"
He opened his mouth to respond.
But Serena, seeing that he hadn't immediately rushed to comfort her, let out a wounded cry and bolted for the door.
"Serena!" He was after her in an instant, his entire demeanor transforming. The ice in his voice melted into something gentle, almost desperate. "All right, all right. I was wrong. I won't meet with any woman alone again. Not for business, not for anything. Will that make you happy?"
He murmured to her as they moved toward the corridor, his hand at the small of her back, his head bent close to hers like she was the only person in the world who mattered.
Then he stopped.
He turned back.
His gaze found the enforcers he'd left in the room.
And when he spoke, every trace of warmth had been stripped away. What remained was the Don. Only the Don.
"Those men. Whichever hand touched her, remove it."
He walked out without looking back.
The enforcers moved forward. Two of them reached beneath their jackets.
I couldn't believe what I was seeing. My body moved before my mind caught up. I threw myself in front of my friends, arms spread wide, my voice shaking with cold fury and something harder than fear.
"Try it. I dare you to try." My words cut through the silence like a blade. "Open your eyes and look at what actually happened. Did they lay a hand on her first? She forced herself on them. They are my friends, and every one of them has a name that carries weight in circles far beyond this room. Touch them. See what happens."
