She looked at her laptop, then at the sleeping Mira. Every instinct told her to throw the card down the drain and run. But the Boron name was a tether she couldn't cut. She opened the laptop, inserted the card, and waited for the files to load.A single video file appeared. It was dated four years ago. The thumbnail was a grainy, night-vision shot of a hallway she recognized all too well—the hallway leading to the room where Mira had been conceived.Ruby hovered the cursor over the play button, her hand shaking. If she clicked this, there was no going back. She would know for sure. But as the video began to buffer, a text message flashed across her phone screen from an unknown number."I know what you're hiding, Ruby. But Baron isn't the one you should be afraid of. Look at the timestamp on the video. Look who leaves the room after him."Ruby's breath caught in her throat. She pressed play, and as the grainy footage began to roll, her eyes widened in horror. She watched Baron leave the room, looking distraught and shaking. But three minutes later, the door opened again, and a second man stepped out of the shadows, adjusting his tie with a cold, calculated smirk.Ruby felt the blood turn to ice in her veins as she recognized the face on the screen."Oh god," she whispered, her hand flying to her mouth.If Baron wasn't the only person in that room that night, then who—?
Ruby leaned back, the blue light of the laptop screen washing over her face like a cold tide. The video looped—just three minutes of grainy, silent footage that dismantled the only truth she had allowed herself to believe for four years. She had always pictured that night as a singular event, a transaction between two souls in a void. Now, the void was crowded.She stared at the second man on the screen. He was older, his movements more deliberate than Baron's. He didn't look like a man who had just shared a profound, tragic moment of intimacy; he looked like a man who had just finished a business negotiation. He paused in the hallway, smoothed the front of his charcoal suit, and checked his reflection in a darkened window with a chillingly vacant expression.Ruby felt a wave of nausea. If Baron had been in the room, and then this man had followed, what did that mean for Mira? She looked at the timestamp. The second man had stayed for nearly an hour after Baron left. Her memory of that night was a fractured mosaic of exhaustion and medication—the doctors at the clinic had given her something to "calm her nerves" before the benefactor arrived. She remembered Baron's voice, the cedarwood scent, the apology. But after he had left, she had drifted into a heavy, drug-induced stupor. She had woken up alone in the morning with the check on the nightstand.Had she been conscious for the second man? Or was he the one who had truly stayed?She stood up abruptly, pacing the small confines of her kitchen. The "Perfect Bride" competition wasn't just a gala or a pageant anymore; it was a crime scene. Every member of that family was a suspect. She looked at the dress Baron had sent—the blood-red silk. Was it a gift of courtship, or was it a uniform for a sacrificial lamb?"Who are you playing with, Baron?" she whispered to the empty room. "Are you trying to save me, or are you just the distraction?"The text message on her phone flickered again. Look who leaves the room after him. The unknown number was still there, a digital phantom. Ruby's mind raced through the Boron brothers. Zion, the eldest, was too clinical, too focused on the bottom line. Brick was a creature of impulse and physical rage. Henry was a ghost of a man, drowned in vice. And then there was the patriarch, Silas.The thought of Silas Boron made her skin crawl. He was the architect of this entire world. If he was the one on that tape, then Mira wasn't just a secret daughter; she was a threat to the entire Boron lineage.Ruby went to the window, pulling the curtain back just an inch. The street below was quiet, save for a single black sedan idling at the end of the block. They were watching her. They weren't even trying to hide it anymore. She wasn't a dancer; she was a bird in a gilded cage, and the bars were starting to glow red-hot.She turned back to the laptop and began to type, searching for any connection between the "Perfect Bride" competition and the medical trust that had saved her mother. She scrolled through old news archives, past the society weddings and the corporate mergers, until she found a small, buried article from five years ago. It mentioned a "charitable initiative" headed by the Boron family to "support the arts and health of the underprivileged."The fine print listed the board of directors for the initiative. Every single one of them was a Boron. But the signature at the bottom of the founding charter—the one that authorized the "special funds" for cases like her mother's—wasn't Baron's. It wasn't Zion's.It was a signature she had seen today on the gala's rehearsal schedule, written in the same sharp, aggressive hand.Ruby closed the laptop and tucked the micro-SD card into the hidden lining of her dance bag. She couldn't run—not with a Boron car outside and her mother's "medical legality" hanging over her head like a guillotine. She had to go to that dinner. She had to wear that red dress. And she had to look into the eyes of every man in that house until she found the one who had stolen the rest of her life while she was too drugged to scream.She walked back into Mira's room, watching the rhythmic rise and fall of her daughter's chest. Mira's hand was curled into a small fist, just like Baron's when he was frustrated. But her nose... the bridge of it was straight and regal, exactly like the man who had walked out of the room three minutes after Baron."I will protect you," Ruby whispered, brushing a curl from Mira's forehead. "Even if I have to burn that tower to the ground with all of them inside."As she lay down on the floor beside Mira's bed, unable to sleep, she realized the most terrifying truth of all: The locket around her neck didn't just contain a picture of her daughter. It contained the only leverage she had—a lock of Mira's hair. If she could get a DNA sample from one of the brothers at the dinner tomorrow, she wouldn't have to wonder anymore.But how do you steal a piece of a god in a room full of his disciples?The morning sun began to bleed through the curtains, gray and unforgiving. The red dress sat on the bed like a bloodstain, waiting for its debut. Ruby stood up, her body aching, her resolve hardening into something cold and sharp. She wasn't just Ruby Dior, the dancer, anymore. She was a mother with her back against the wall.She picked up her phone and messaged the unknown number back.I'll be there tonight. Don't look for me. I'll find you.She didn't know if she was messaging a friend or a foe, but as she stepped into the shower, letting the hot water wash away the scent of the Annex and the fear of the night, Ruby Dior prepared herself for the performance of a lifetime. The "Perfect Bride" was about to show the Borons exactly how dangerous a woman with nothing to lose could be.The question remained, vibrating in the back of her mind like a broken string on a cello: If the video showed two men, and Baron thought he was the father, who was the man who had stayed behind to ensure she never remembered the truth?