My grandmother Victoria Valcruz had always given Jessica everything. The billion-dollar inheritance. A perfect coming-out ceremony at the annual Syndicate gala, her photograph placed in every society column from New York to Naples as "The Valcruz Principessa." A curated rise through the criminal aristocracy, draped in Valentino and dripping with lies.
So I knew, with the certainty of a woman who had learned to read the cruelty in silence, that she would finally give me this: a wedding full of thorns.
As anticipated, an envelope arrived the next morning.
It was delivered not by post but by a man in a black suit who said nothing, placed it on the table in the servants' wing where I took my meals, and left without meeting my eyes. The envelope was heavy, cream-colored stock, sealed in blood-red wax bearing the Arrows crest — a coiled serpent wound around a crown, its fangs bared, its body forming the letter A.
I stared at it for a long time. My fingers trembled as I broke the seal, the wax cracking like a small bone.
MARRIAGE CONTRACT
Athena Valcruz and Killian Arrows
Status: Approved
Along with the contract was a letter addressed to me. The handwriting was severe and precise, each letter formed with the discipline of a man who had signed death warrants with the same hand.
I will come to receive you in three days. A private villa has already been prepared. Bridal fittings are scheduled. Our marriage is in two weeks.
— Killian
The wedding ceremony. In two weeks.
I placed the letter down on the desk, my hand numb.
So this was it.
I had been sold. Again.
Just this time, it was my own voice that had sealed the bargain — and that single act of supposed agency made me realize what I had always known but refused to name: this family never accepted me from the beginning. I was not a daughter. I was inventory. A name on a ledger to be traded when the accounts ran dry.
I left the servants' wing and walked down the long hallway of the Valcruz compound, the corridor lined with oil paintings of men who had built this empire on blood and loyalty — virtues my father possessed neither of. My footsteps echoed against marble floors that I had scrubbed on my hands and knees as a child while Jessica ate breakfast in the sunroom. I was walking through the architecture of my own erasure, reminiscing on the life I was about to throw away, when I came across Xander's room.
And the noises stopped me cold.
Low pants. Masculine moans. The sound ignited the atmosphere of the hallway like a match touched to gasoline — raw, ferocious, shameless. The kind of sound that belonged behind locked doors in the dark hours, not bleeding through the walls of a family compound in the pale light of morning.
My hand reached for the door handle.
I opened hell.
Xander was sitting shirtless on the edge of his bed, his back partially turned to me, muscles taut beneath skin that gleamed with sweat. His hand was buried between his legs, his eyes half-closed, his jaw clenched, lost in a pleasure so consuming he hadn't heard the door. The room smelled of turpentine and musk and something feral.
Papers were scattered everywhere. The floor. The bed. The desk. Sheets and sheets of them, some crumpled, some pristine, all covered in charcoal and graphite.
My eyes widened as I stumbled back.
Jessica.
He had drawn her face in every angle. Laughing, her head thrown back. Looking over her shoulder with that coy, practiced expression she wore like armor. Hair tousled like she had just rolled out of someone's bed. Profile. Three-quarter view. Close-up of her lips. Close-up of her eyes.
And then there was something more.
Sketches of her nude.
Not crude or pornographic, but intimate. Soft curves rendered with a reverence that made my stomach turn. In one image, she was lying on her back, her head turned slightly, mouth parted as if mid-whisper. In another, her arms stretched above her head, a silk sheet barely covering her thighs, the graphite smudged where his fingers had lingered over her form.
I stood frozen as Xander lifted one particular sketch — Jessica topless, back arched, one hand resting on her collarbone — and kissed the paper softly. His lips pressed against the charcoal image of her throat, and a moan of pleasure filled the room, guttural and aching.
"Jess… Jess…"
I felt everything inside me sink. Collapse. Not like a building falling, but like the ground itself opening beneath my feet, swallowing me into a darkness that had been waiting patiently for years.
He hadn't just used me.
He had never even seen me.
Then his phone buzzed on the nightstand. He reached for it with his free hand, his breathing still ragged, and answered without looking at the screen.
"No," he said gruffly, his voice thick. "I can't return to the Family until she's mine. I want her at my side as my queen. Jessica is my everything."
I choked on my breath.
The Family.
Xander Thorne.
My heart froze completely. The blood in my veins turned to ice water, and for a moment the hallway tilted, the paintings on the walls blurring into smears of gold and shadow.
Xander Thorne. The Don of the Thorne Syndicate. One of the most powerful crime families on the Eastern Seaboard.
My once-betrothed. The man I had been blood-promised to through an old family pact sealed before I could walk — a man I had never seen, whose face had been kept from me by design. The man who had shown up at my mother's funeral not to mourn but to make a public declaration, standing before the gathered families and calling me "unworthy of his blood." He had broken the pact in front of every Don, every Consigliere, every soldier who mattered, and I had stood there in my black dress with dirt still under my fingernails from the grave, and I had said nothing.
A tear escaped my eye.
He had been beside me this whole time. Three years. A new name. A new face — or perhaps the same face I had simply never been shown. He had walked into the Valcruz compound disguised as a low-ranking soldier, a bodyguard, a nobody, and I had welcomed him like a lamb to slaughter.
"I am only here for Jessica," he continued into the phone, his tone dropping into something casual and dismissive, the way men in this world spoke about things that didn't matter. "Always was. Athena? Still throwing herself at me like a dog in heat. You think I would waste three years on Athena if it wasn't for the bigger picture?"
Tears streamed down my face as a dagger twisted in my heart, driven deep and turned with precision.
"She is useful and lonely. That's what makes her easy. Always trying to seduce me, wearing those clothes… it is almost like she is a prostitute."
I couldn't breathe. Couldn't feel my legs. The wall was the only thing holding me upright, and even that felt like it might give way.
Three years. Three goddamn years. I had let him into every corner of my life. My schedule. My insecurities. The location of my mother's ashes, which I kept in a small urn hidden in the back of my closet because no one in this family would give her a proper place on the memorial shelf. He knew when my panic attacks came, knew the triggers, knew the way my hands shook before they started. He knew which vintage I reached for after brutal sit-downs with the family's associates, and he had poured it for me in silence, and I had mistaken that silence for loyalty.
I thought he was stone. Unmoved by glitz and glamour. A soldier who saw through the gilded corruption of this world and chose to stand beside me anyway.
But all this time, he had been chasing her. The reason my mother died of heartbreak.
The day my mother found out that my father had kept a mistress — had fathered a second child and hidden her in an apartment across the city — something in her snapped. I was there. I witnessed it. She stopped eating first. Then she stopped speaking. Then she began scratching at her own skin until she bled, dragging her nails down her forearms as if trying to claw her way out of her own body.
I was eight years old when they took her to the psychiatric wing of a private hospital. The men who came for her wore white coats, and they held her arms gently, but her eyes found mine over their shoulders — broken, hollow, already gone. She looked at me for the last time, and I didn't understand then that it was the last time.
One day, she walked into the sea wearing pearls and never came back.
They called it "an accident." The family released a statement. Victoria Valcruz wore black for exactly one week.
Jessica moved into the compound the following Monday. Took my room. Slept in my bed. Called my mother "that unstable woman" at the dinner table while my father said nothing and my grandmother poured more wine.
She framed me at ten for trying to push her down the stairs. My father slapped me across the face in front of the servants — the crack of his hand against my cheek echoing through the foyer, and not a single person in that house moved to stop him. The soldiers looked at the floor. The housekeepers turned away. I learned that day what Omertà truly meant. It was not just silence about the Family's crimes. It was silence about everything.
I should have walked away. Should have screamed when Xander chose her. And yet I stood in the doorway, frozen, my tears still wet on my face, my breath still caught in my chest.
Xander turned.
Our eyes met.
He didn't flinch. There was no shock in his expression, no guilt, no flicker of recognition that I had just heard every word. He looked at me the way a man looks at a servant who has entered without permission — mild irritation, nothing more.
He saw that I had looked at his body, and he dressed himself without a shred of shame or haste, pulling a shirt over his shoulders and buttoning it with steady fingers, his eyes never leaving mine. Not with heat. Not with cruelty. With nothing. Absolute, devastating nothing.
"Even if I am your guard, knock before you enter, Miss Valcruz."
Miss Valcruz.
As if he hadn't memorized the sound of my footsteps in every hallway of this compound. As if he hadn't learned the pattern of my panic attacks — the way my breathing shortened first, then my hands, then the tunnel vision. As if he didn't know exactly how I liked my wine after sit-downs that went badly: a Barolo, no more than two glasses, poured in silence.
As if he hadn't held me when I collapsed on the bathroom floor the day I lost my mother's estate in the probate courts — the last thing she had left me, the only proof she had ever existed outside of my memory. He had found me whimpering on the cold tile, thrashing like a ragdoll, and he had gathered me into his arms and held me until I went still. I had thought it meant something. I had thought it meant everything.
He moved to pick up his sketchbook from the bed, wiping the cover carefully, reverently, as if it were a holy relic, before tucking it into the drawer of his nightstand.
I could no longer bear the silence. My voice came out steadier than I expected, a mask I had learned to wear in a house that punished weakness.
"Tomorrow is an event I am organizing. You have to follow me as my bodyguard."
"Will Miss Jessica come?"
My heart shattered completely. I looked at him with my eyes wide, and for a moment the room blurred, the scattered drawings swimming in my peripheral vision like ghosts.
"W-What?" My voice cracked. "It's a tribute for my mom… for her death anniversary! Do you think I would invite that wench?"
As soon as my words reached his ears, Xander's face darkened instantly. His jaw tightened. His eyes went cold, not with anger directed at the memory of my mother's suffering, but with something protective and territorial — a wolf hearing its mate insulted. Not for the mother who had raised me in a back room of the servants' wing while Jessica had nannies and riding lessons and a closet full of designer gowns. No. His darkness was for Jessica. Always for Jessica.
"Follow me tomorrow. It is an order." I turned to leave, my throat burning with acid and unshed screams.
Then, as if to make sure the knife twisted fully, as if the universe demanded I understand the completeness of my humiliation, I heard him mutter under his breath as I walked away.
"She's still chasing me." His voice was low, almost amused. "Thinks one night in my bed changed anything. It's pitiful."
I stopped walking.
He didn't know I heard.
Didn't care if I had.
For him, I was just the stepping stone. A lonely, desperate girl from a powerful family, useful for proximity, useful for access, useful for the intelligence I unknowingly fed him about the Valcruz operations while he positioned himself closer and closer to the woman he actually wanted. I was the unlocked door. Jessica was the treasure behind it.
I left the door open behind me.
Let the cold air from the hallway blow through into his room, scattering the edges of his precious drawings, and I told myself as I walked back toward the servants' wing that everything was coming to an end.
The contract was signed. The Arrows crest was pressed into wax. In three days, a car would come for me, and I would leave this compound and never return.
I was going away from the chaos.
And if the place I was going was worse — if the Devil in Dior was crueler than the devils I already knew — then at least it would be a different kind of darkness.
At least it would be mine.
