Damien POV
The Crimson Cage was suffocating tonight. The air was thick with the stench of cheap gin and expensive Cuban cigars, but it was the mindless chatter of Spencer across the table that was truly grating on my nerves. He was rambling about a delayed shipment from Chicago, but I wasn't listening.
My mind was stuck on the Fifth Avenue penthouse.
I took a slow drag of my cigar, my jaw tight. Isabella’s dead, hollow eyes when I burned her pathetic annulment papers earlier today still irritated me. I had expected tears. I had expected her to beg, to scream, to show some kind of emotion that I could crush and mold back into submission. Instead, she had walked out of my office with a chilling, absolute silence. It was a disruption to my order, a quiet defiance that gnawed at my need for absolute control. She was throwing a tantrum, I told myself. She would learn her place soon enough.
My phone vibrated against the mahogany table.
I glanced at the screen. *Caden.*
My brow furrowed. My bleeding-heart, useless brother never texted me directly. He avoided my presence like a plague.
I picked up the phone and opened the message. The air in my lungs instantly turned to lead.
It was a photograph. Spread across a dark wooden desk was Isabella’s passport, her birth certificate, and a thick, blue leather-bound book. I recognized that book the second my eyes landed on it. The master smuggling ledgers. The true, unredacted lifeblood of the Trevino empire—the ones I kept locked away, the ones she had meticulously charted with her brilliant, wasted mind.
Beneath the image was a single line of text.
*The ledgers are singing.*
A roaring sound filled my ears, drowning out the jazz band on the stage. Betrayal. Fratricide. War. I dialed Caden’s number. It went straight to voicemail. I dialed Isabella’s. Nothing.
This wasn't a wife throwing a tantrum. This was a hostage orchestrating a coup.
I shoved my chair back so violently it crashed to the floor. Spencer flinched, his whiskey spilling over his knuckles. "Damien? Is everything—"
I didn't answer. I stormed out of the speakeasy, the shadows of my Soldiers parting like the Red Sea before my wrath.
The armored Cadillac tore through the rain-slicked streets of Manhattan like a black bullet. My knuckles were white on the steering wheel, my blood boiling with a rage so pure it tasted like copper. I was going to kill Caden. I would mount his head on the gates of the estate for this treason. And Isabella... I didn't know what I was going to do to her, but she would never see the light of day again.
My phone rang through the car's speakers. *Eleanor Trevino.*
I hit the answer button. "Not now, Mother."
"I have already handled your little problem," Eleanor’s voice cut through the tense silence of the car, sharp and unyielding as a guillotine.
"What are you talking about?" I snarled, swerving past a slow-moving taxi.
"Your wife attempted to move her belongings into the guest wing," my mother stated, her tone dripping with aristocratic disdain. "A public separation under our own roof. It is a pathetic display of weakness, Damien. It invites the wolves to our door."
My jaw clenched so hard my teeth ached. "Where is she?"
"I had Mrs. Higgins lock every spare room and confiscate the keys," the former Mafia Queen lectured, treating me like an incompetent subordinate rather than the Don of New York. "She is locked in the master suite. I corralled your property for you. Now come home, act like a true Don, and make her obey."
*Click.*
She hung up.
The sheer audacity of it all—my brother’s treason, my wife’s rebellion, my mother’s suffocating interference—ignited a hellfire in my veins. I slammed my foot on the gas, the Cadillac’s engine roaring as I ran a red light.
The private elevator to the penthouse felt agonizingly slow. When the polished steel doors finally slid open, the oppressive silence of the foyer greeted me. Mrs. Higgins was standing near the hallway, her face ashen, her hands trembling violently as she clutched a ring of brass keys.
She opened her mouth to speak, but one look at my face made her swallow her words and shrink against the cold marble wall.
I didn't spare her a second glance. My eyes were locked on the heavy double doors at the end of the hall. The master suite. My bedroom. Her cage.
Every step I took echoed like a death knell. She thought she could steal from me. She thought she could use my own blood against me. She thought she could just walk away from the Dark Don.
I reached the doors. I didn't knock. I planted my hands flat against the heavy wood and shoved them open with enough force to crack the hinges.
