Chapter 3

I hammered each phrase home, then let the question land.

"And I spent that whole stretch chained to a desk in the Manhattan office. Never once set foot on the training floor. Never crossed paths with Mr. Voss. So tell me — how exactly were we supposed to fall in love?"

Every word hit Kai and Liora like a fist.

Kai froze mid-breath. Liora's composure cracked, her face draining white in an instant.

Into that thin, brittle silence, someone nobody expected stepped forward.

Elowen. The woman who'd dressed me, fed me, and kept my secrets for eighteen years.

She dropped to her knees with a crack against the marble, sobbing, and pressed her forehead to the floor in front of the Don.

"Don — Miss Flora... she's lying!"

She pointed a shaking finger at me, her face twisted with what looked, to anyone who didn't know her, like grief.

"The moment Miss Flora came back to the family, she ran into Mr. Voss. It was instant — she's been in love with him since that very day!"

Her voice broke on a wail, as if the injustice of it was eating her alive.

"Donna and this family have been nothing but good to her. How could she turn around and smear Donna like this?"

I watched panic in Kai's eyes flip straight into something closer to joy. He'd been thrown a rope, and he grabbed it with both hands.

He turned to me with an expression I'd never once seen from him in either life — his eyes gone soft, brimming, like I was something precious he'd thought he'd lost for good.

"Flora. So you're still angry with me."

"I know. I know I let you wait too long."

He even took a step toward me, one hand lifting like he meant to pull me into him — then stopped himself, as if propriety alone was holding him back. Pained. Restrained.

"But why would you do this? Why tear me down in front of everyone just to test what I feel for you?"

It was a beautiful performance. Devastatingly sincere.

The mood in the ballroom flipped on a dime. Whispers rippled through the crowd.

"God, the second Marrick daughter is colder than I thought — cornering him into marriage like that."

"Poor Voss. In love with her for years and this is the thanks he gets, humiliated in front of the whole family."

Liora picked up her cue without missing a beat, her brow pinched with manufactured heartbreak.

"Flora, how could you? Kai has loved you faithfully this whole time, and you repay him by breaking his heart in public?"

One soft confession. One wounded outcry. The two of them moved together so cleanly it looked rehearsed a hundred times over — because it had been.

I watched them work and felt nothing but contempt.

They could paint black as white in three sentences flat, convict me, and hand me the same death sentence all over again. Of course they could. They'd built this act together long before tonight.

I didn't bother reacting to the show. I turned back to the Don instead.

"Every word I've said is true. If you don't believe me, sir — look closer at the woman in that footage."

The Don's patience was thinning fast, but he gestured anyway, and the screen rewound, slowed, played again.

"The footage is a mess," he said. "What exactly am I supposed to see in that?"

"Sir." My voice stayed level, almost clinical. "Look just beneath her right eye."

He narrowed his eyes and zoomed in.

"There's a mark there. Small. Easy to miss unless you know to look for it."

Liora's body swayed, just barely, like the floor had tilted under her.

I lifted my eyes and met hers straight on.

"Everyone in this family knows Donna has a beauty mark under her right eye. Everyone's seen it."

"I don't have one."