Ariella didn't speak for a long time.
She stood in the middle of the safehouse bedroom, the sheet clutched tight around her body, her heart pounding as Lucien's words echoed through her mind.
Your father is alive.
She'd buried him.
In her heart, if not in reality.
He had vanished when she was sixteen — no goodbye, no letter, no closure. Just debts, silence, and a shattered childhood.
Now he was back?
And reaching out?
"Why now?" she finally asked, voice brittle.
Lucien was already pulling on a shirt, pacing, all that cold composure from earlier gone.
"I don't know. But if someone tipped him off about the investigation… it means someone's been watching me. Watching you. And they wanted him active again."
"Why would anyone want that?"
He turned to her, eyes dark. "To shake us. To take control of the game."
Ariella blinked. "What game?"
"The one we've been playing since I brought you into this world," he said flatly. "Power. Leverage. Debt. Everything we've touched has been calculated, and now the board's shifting."
She sat down slowly, mind spinning. "He left me with nothing, Lucien. I starved because of him. He abandoned me."
Lucien knelt in front of her.
"But someone wants you to believe he's back for you. And I don't buy it."
He reached into his phone and handed it to her.
"This is the photo my contact sent. It's recent. From last night. That's him, isn't it?"
She stared at the screen.
Same eyes. Same walk. Just older, grayer, thinner. Her stomach dropped.
"…That's him."
Lucien's jaw tightened. "Then he's not just alive. He's active. And that means you're not safe."
Ariella looked at him. "So what now? You lock me up again? Hide me behind bodyguards and glass walls?"
"No," he said firmly.
Her eyes widened.
"I bring you in," Lucien continued. "Fully. No more half-truths. No more protection from a distance. You want to fight? Then I'll train you to fight. Because whoever's playing this game…" His eyes darkened. "…is trying to use your blood against us."
"And my father?"
"If he's back," Lucien said, standing, "we make him come to us."
Ariella swallowed the fear rising in her chest.
She wasn't ready for this.
But she was done being a pawn.
If someone was trying to drag her past into the light — to destroy Lucien, to ruin her — then she'd face them head-on.
Even if the person she had to confront…
...was the man who gave her life.