Two days.
That was how long I remained sealed inside my room on the third floor of the servants' wing, folding what little I owned into a single leather valise and preparing to disappear from the Valcruz compound forever.
I ate nothing. The water I drank tasted like rust. My body hollowed itself out until the hunger became indistinguishable from the grief — both just dull, constant pressure behind my ribs. But the strange mercy of those forty-eight hours was this: the wounds that had been screaming since the night my legacy was signed away to a stranger had gone quiet. Not healed. Numbed. The way frostbite kills the nerve before it kills the limb.
A knock came.
"Athena?" Jessica's voice drifted through the oak door, honeyed and precise — the tone she reserved for moments when she knew someone might be listening from the hall.
I didn't move. Didn't speak. My hands continued folding a wool cardigan that had belonged to my mother.
The door creaked open anyway.
Jessica stepped inside as though the room belonged to her — as though every room in this compound belonged to her, which, by now, it effectively did. She wore a champagne-colored dress that caught the low light from my single window, her dark hair pinned with a jeweled clip that I recognized. It had been my mother's too.
"Sister, I know you have been… going through things," she said, each word measured and sweet as candied poison, "but it's my birthday, and everyone is asking where you are. You have to come downstairs and greet the guests. Even if Father is angry with you… you are still his daughter."
I said nothing. I pulled another blouse from the wardrobe and laid it flat on the bed.
"Athena… please?" She tilted her head, and the jeweled clip caught the light like a wink. "I'm just trying to keep the family together."
And then another voice followed.
Deeper. Colder.
His.
"Where are you going? Why can't you act normal for once—"
"You are my servant, not my master." The words left me before I could measure them, cutting through the stale air of that room like a stiletto drawn from a sheath. "No need to forget your place."
Xander froze in the doorway. His face emptied of expression the way a man trained in violence learns to empty it — not calm, but controlled. A mask pulled tight over whatever seethed beneath. He stood in a dark suit with no tie, his shoulders filling the frame, and he looked at me with the flat, assessing gaze of a soldier who had decided I was not worth the ammunition.
I hadn't seen him since that night. The night he sat in my father's study and watched my birthright get bartered away like contraband at a dockside auction.
"Miss Athena, you have everything," he said finally, his voice dropping into the formal register he used when others could hear. "The Valcruz name. The fortune and legacy. You don't need to compete with your sister or bully her." A pause. His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. "The least you can do is show up for one night. Just behave."
I laughed.
It broke out of me — bitter and raw and more painful than a sob, scraping against my throat like broken glass. The sound didn't belong in that room. It didn't belong anywhere.
Behave.
Jessica sniffled on cue, her lashes glistening with tears so perfectly timed they might as well have been choreographed. "Xander, you are my sister's bodyguard and friend, so please help me… I just want Athena to come downstairs. Everyone's talking…"
I turned my face toward the window.
If I looked at either of them for another second, I was going to scream — and if I screamed, I would not stop.
"Get out," I said. My voice was hoarse and dull, scraped hollow. "I will be there."
Because the only thing worse than being broken was letting them see it.
The ballroom of the Valcruz compound had been transformed.
Soft pink and gold draped every surface — silk bunting cascading from the vaulted ceiling, walls dressed in arrangements of pale roses so thick their perfume hung in the air like a narcotic. Crystal chandeliers cast their light downward in shimmering curtains, and the marble floor gleamed like the surface of a frozen lake. Laughter floated through the room, thick and sickly sweet, mingling with the clink of champagne flutes and the low murmur of men whose smiles never quite reached their eyes.
Every family of consequence on the Eastern Seaboard had sent someone. Capos and their wives. Consiglieri in bespoke suits. Associates who ran legitimate fronts — restaurants, import companies, construction firms — all gathered under the Valcruz roof to celebrate the birthday of a girl who had no true blood-claim to the name embossed on the invitation.
And then I heard him.
My father.
Laughing.
Proud.
"So, the Thorne heir himself came chasing after my Jessica!" Don Mason Valcruz beamed to a circle of men in black tuxedos, a tumbler of aged scotch catching the chandelier light in his hand. His face was flushed with the particular glow of a man who believed his own mythology. "Xander Thorne, of all people. The Don of the Thorne Syndicate, right here in my house. I always knew my daughter was special."
Someone in the circle — a silver-haired Capo whose name I didn't catch — asked about me.
My father didn't hesitate.
"Athena?" A wave of dismissal passed over his face, casual as brushing lint from a lapel. "She is a troublesome child. Not like Jessica. Incomparable to that well-behaved girl. Always in conflict, always needing attention. A headache since the day she was born."
I froze. The words sank their claws into my throat and held. Still, I stood there in the shadow of a marble column at the far edge of the ballroom, invisible to everyone, listening to my own father erase me from the family portrait with the ease of a man crossing a name off a ledger.
Then Jessica's voice rang out over the microphone at the front of the room.
"Everyone!" she sang, her tone bright as a bell in a cathedral. "I want to say something before the cake!"
The crowd gathered, drawn like moths to her manufactured glow. Men straightened their ties. Women tilted their heads. Even the soldiers stationed along the walls shifted their attention toward the small stage where Jessica stood bathed in rose-gold light, a vision of innocence in her champagne dress with my mother's clip glinting in her hair.
She smiled sweetly, her gaze sweeping over the assembled faces until it landed on me in the shadows. She beckoned me forward with a delicate wave of her fingers, as though I were a prop she had positioned for this exact moment.
"I know things have been… tense," she said into the microphone, her voice soft and saintly, pitched to carry just the right tremor of vulnerability. "But I want you all to know… that my sister and I have made amends."
I blinked.
She turned to me, her eyes wide and glistening with false emotion. "I am sorry if I made you angry and jealous, sister. My intention was never to compete with you. No matter how much you hated me, I have always looked up to you…" She pressed a hand to her chest. "Because at the end of the day, we are sisters."
The guests murmured. Heads nodded. Women dabbed at their eyes. The narrative was perfect — the gracious, forgiving younger sister extending an olive branch to the bitter, jealous elder. Jessica had always understood that in this world, perception was the only truth that mattered.
She smiled like she had just performed a miracle. "I just want us to be a family again." Her eyes found mine across the room, luminous and lethal. "Don't you, Athena?"
My lips parted, but I had no voice. The words were trapped somewhere beneath the rubble of everything she had already destroyed.
She turned back to the cake — a towering confection of white fondant and sugar roses — and sliced it with elegant precision before lifting the first bite on a silver fork.
"To my sister," she said sweetly, raising the fork like a toast. "May she one day find peace and purpose."
She stepped closer and offered the fork to me.
I didn't take it.
Her whisper reached only my ears, so close I could smell her perfume — jasmine and something darker, something chemical.
"That's the last thing you will ever taste as part of this family, bitch." The sweetness evaporated from her voice like steam. What remained was ice. "First your mother was thrown out, and now it's time you follow her. Your father isn't your own. Your ex-fiancé is running after me like a man possessed. And even your bodyguard — the one you loved — has chosen me above you. You are nothing."
My eyes burned bloodshot red, the tears pressing against them like a tide held back by crumbling stone. Every instinct in my body screamed at me to break — to shatter in front of all of them, to give Jessica the satisfaction of watching me crumble on the marble floor of her birthday celebration.
I would not.
I spun on my heel, ready to walk out of that golden hell, to disappear through the service corridor and never look back.
And that was when it happened.
My dress tugged — a sharp, violent pull at the base of my spine, as though a hand had seized the fabric and wrenched.
Then—
SNAP.
Air hit my bare back like ice water.
Gasps tore through the ballroom — a collective intake of breath that silenced the string quartet, the laughter, the clink of crystal, everything.
The weight of silk slid down my body in a merciless wave, the fabric pooling at my waist and then lower, baring my skin to the chandelier light. My breasts were exposed. My arms. The vulnerable architecture of my ribs.
I clutched the fabric to my chest, but it was too late.
Cameras flashed. The sharp, staccato bursts of light exploded from every direction — phones raised like weapons, capturing the moment with the hungry precision of vultures descending on a carcass.
A low whistle cut through the silence. Then another. Men openly gawked, their eyes crawling over me with a lecherous hunger that made my skin feel like it was being peeled away strip by strip.
My arms shook as I tried to pull the ruined dress back up, my fingers scrabbling at the fabric, but the clasp was gone. Not broken. Cut. The severance was clean, deliberate, and cruel — a razor's work, executed with surgical precision sometime before I had put the dress on, or in the press of the crowd when I hadn't felt the hand at my back.
I knelt on the cold marble floor, tears spilling down my face, the dress gathered against my chest in a desperate bundle.
Behind me, Jessica gasped as though she were the one who had been attacked.
"Oh no, sister!" she cried, her hand flying to her lips with practiced horror. "Athena… why would you do something like that? Is this for attention again?"
The crowd turned.
Their faces melted together — shock, curiosity, disgust, amusement — a carousel of expressions spinning around me as I knelt on the floor of my father's ballroom, half-naked and trembling, while two hundred guests watched and did nothing.
And then—
He moved.
Xander.
From the far edge of the room, his tall frame cut through the frozen crowd like a blade through still water. His gaze locked onto mine. Cold. Distant. He came forward with the measured stride of a man performing a duty he found distasteful, and yet he did not shield me. Did not step between me and the cameras. Did not raise his voice to silence the room.
He shrugged off his jacket — a dark, beautifully tailored thing — like he was shedding an inconvenience.
And then he dropped it at my feet.
Not on my shoulders. Not around me. Not with any gesture of protection or tenderness.
At my feet. Like it was a choice I didn't deserve but was being granted anyway.
A gesture that said: Cover yourself. You have embarrassed us all.
I knelt there and grabbed it with shaking hands, tears tumbling down my cheeks in absolute devastation, pulling the jacket over my trembling frame. It smelled like him — sandalwood and cold air and something metallic, like gunmetal — and the scent nearly broke me more than the humiliation had.
The room fell away in blurred edges and muted laughter as Xander guided me toward the exit. No words. No comfort. Just the pressure of his hand at my elbow, firm and impersonal, as though I were a disturbance to be escorted out quietly before I caused any further embarrassment to the evening's proceedings.
We reached the hallway, and I tore away from his grip and rushed into the bathroom, slamming the door shut behind me and locking it with fingers that could barely close around the bolt.
My back hit the cold tile wall, and I slid to the floor. The marble bit into my bare thighs as I clutched Xander's jacket around me like a makeshift shield, pulling it tighter, tighter, as though I could disappear inside it. My breath came ragged and broken. My hands wouldn't stop trembling. Shame crawled up my spine like something alive — a colony of fire ants marching beneath my skin, burrowing deeper with every heartbeat.
Hot tears traced burning paths down my face, and I pressed my forehead to my knees and wished — with a desperation that bordered on prayer — that the earth would open beneath me and swallow me whole.
Then I heard Jessica's voice outside the door.
The crying. The trembling, theatrical sobs of a woman performing grief for an audience.
"W-Why would my sister do that?!"
"The way she acts…" Xander's voice came next — low, clipped, and cold as a blade laid flat against skin. "Like it means nothing. Like stripping in front of hundreds was a performance she was proud of. That is something an innocent person like you will never understand, Miss Jessica."
Then came the words that pierced my heart like knives driven slowly between the ribs.
"I can't believe a woman could act with so little self-respect," Xander muttered, his voice carrying through the door with merciless clarity. "Who takes their clothes off like that? For what — attention? Sympathy? A moment in the spotlight?"
I stared at the bathroom floor. The tiles blurred. The walls pressed inward.
"I mean, she has always been an attention-seeker — framing you, acting like a…" He paused, and the pause was worse than the word that followed. "A prostitute." His voice was flat. Final. The verdict of a man who had already closed the case. "But tonight proved it. No woman with dignity would do something like that. She exposed herself in front of everyone."
The words were bullets.
One.
After.
Another.
Each one punching through whatever was left of me, shattering bone and marrow and the last fragile membrane of hope that maybe — maybe — someone in this compound saw me as I truly was.
He truly thought I chose this. That I had planned the humiliation. That I wanted eyes crawling over my skin, wanted to be reduced to something less than human in front of a ballroom full of made men and their wives and the soldiers who would carry this story to every corner of the underworld by morning.
I pressed Xander's jacket to my face and breathed in the scent of the man I had loved — the man I had given my heart to in the foolish, desperate belief that someone in this family of vipers might protect me.
To think I loved this kind of man.
To think I gave him my heart.
I was full of regrets — each one heavier than the last, stacked inside my chest like stones in a drowning woman's pockets.
Loving him was the biggest mistake of my life.
