Secrets tasted like blood on her tongue.
She could still feel the birth certificate burning in her mind with every smile she forced at dinner, every toast raised beneath chandeliers dripping with gold.
She was drowning in lies, and Damien's eyes never left her.
The dinner hall stretched like a cathedral. The table gleamed with silver and crystal, a sea of glittering eyes, polite laughter, and conversations honed to the sharpness of blades. Every guest,business partners, distant Varezzi cousins, wives lacquered in pearls, wore their faces like armor.
Masks, all of them.
And tonight, Elara wore hers too.
She let her lips curve in a smile that wasn't hers, her voice chimed in greetings she barely remembered, and when a toast was raised to "the strength of the Varezzi bloodline," she lifted her glass with steady hands though she could still feel the tremor beneath her skin.
The truth was folded into her bones now. Her father was not her father. Her past had been rewritten long before she had ever dared question it. And the people around her tonight, draped in velvet and diamonds, would devour her alive if they suspected.
Across the table, Damien leaned back in his chair, head tilted just slightly, watching. Always watching. His glass of wine rested untouched, but the curve of his mouth was a secret in itself. He had spoken little since they sat down, letting the others fill the hall with their schemes and laughter. Yet Elara felt him like a storm humming low over her shoulder.
He knew.
He didn't know what, but he knew something had shifted in her.
"Elara," one of the cousins, Marcellus, his smile wide and predatory leaned forward. "Tell us again how you were raised in an orphanage. But somehow ended here,plucked you out of nowhere? A fairy tale. A stray brought home by a prince."
A ripple of laughter swelled.
Elara's mask did not crack. "I would hardly call myself a stray," she said, her tone light but edged with steel. "But perhaps that's how the story will be told."
Her voice earned approving murmurs, but Marcellus smirked, eyes glinting. "Careful. In this family, stories have a way of becoming truth."
Damien's voice sliced through the air, low and silken. "Some stories should never be told at all."
The laughter stuttered. Marcellus sat back, his smirk faltering under Damien's gaze. No one challenged him when his tone shifted like that.
Elara didn't look at Damien, but she felt the weight of his intervention. He wasn't defending her; he was claiming the space around her. Drawing invisible lines no one dared cross.
Dinner stretched on. Conversations circled in practiced politeness, and every glance across the table felt loaded. Elara played her role, her mask unbroken, even when her thoughts threatened to unravel her composure.
She was barely listening when Damien's hand brushed against hers beneath the table.
It was deliberate, not a mistake. A feather-light touch, fingers grazing her knuckles before retreating just enough to leave fire where skin had met skin. Her pulse leapt, her mask threatened to slip, and she kept her eyes trained on her plate as though nothing had happened.
When she dared glance sideways, Damien's gaze was already on her, steady and merciless. His lips curved slightly, not in warmth, but in a challenge.
It was his way of saying: I see you breaking.
The conversation around them shifted to business. One uncle, bald and sweating, spoke of land acquisitions. Another cousin bragged of deals sealed overseas. Words blurred in Elara's ears, but one thread pierced through, their talk of orphanages, of acquisitions masked as charity, of profit born from ruin.
Her stomach twisted.
These were the ledgers she had seen. The ledgers that had revealed too much. The numbers whispered of lives bought and sold.
She gripped her wine glass tighter, forcing her expression into polite neutrality.
But Damien noticed. Of course he noticed.
His voice cut in, sharp enough to silence the table. "You all speak too freely." His eyes slid over the group before settling, pointedly, on Elara. "Walls have ears. And not every ear is loyal."
A silence followed.
Her skin went cold.
The others chuckled nervously, brushing off his words, but Elara heard the message buried beneath. He wasn't talking to them. He was talking to her.
I know you've been listening where you shouldn't.
Her breath caught, but she didn't flinch. She raised her glass to her lips, sipping slowly, steady as stone.
Her mask was still in place.
When the final toast was made and the guests began to disperse, Elara slipped from her chair, every muscle aching from restraint. She made for the corridor, heart thundering, each step a retreat from suffocation.
The hallways were dim, lined with portraits of Varezzi ancestors staring down with oil-painted scorn. Their painted eyes followed her as though they knew, knew she didn't belong, knew she carried secrets not meant to be hers.
Her chest burned. She pushed through the nearest door and stumbled into the garden.
Cold night air rushed her lungs, and for a moment she pressed a hand to her chest, gulping down freedom.
She thought she was alone.
But the sound of footsteps followed, unhurried, inevitable.
She turned, and Damien stepped into the moonlight.
His jacket was undone, his tie loosened, but he carried himself like the heir he was, unshakable, untouchable, dangerous. His shadow stretched long across the stones as he came toward her, and she could not move.
"Running away?" he asked softly.
Her jaw tightened. "I needed air."
"You needed escape," he corrected. His voice was not cruel, it was worse. It was calm, patient, the voice of a predator who never rushed the kill.
He stopped close enough that she could feel the heat radiating off him. His eyes searched hers, not hurried, but relentless, as if he were reading pages she hadn't meant to open.
"What did you see?" His words were quiet, almost tender.