Dangerously Mine

Chapter 19

Time had passed, and the heavy afternoon light had completely faded into dinner time. Some of the distant relatives had finally left, but many stayed behind. The ones who remained were the ones who moved with a different kind of quiet confidence. I could tell these were the ones closer to the center of the family.

To the Mikaelson family.

We were seated around a massive, polished mahogany table that stretched across the formal dining room. The smell of roasted lamb and rich, heavy sauces filled the air, but the food felt like ash in my mouth.

"So, how did you two actually meet each other?"

The question came from a woman in her mid thirties sitting across from me. She had sharp, sculpted cheekbones and wore a dark emerald gown that caught the low light of the chandelier.

I felt my posture stiffen. I glanced over at Jacob. He was sitting perfectly relaxed, casually swirling the dark red wine in his glass. When our eyes locked, a heavy, silent tension stretched between us. We were both trying to figure out what to say, how to spin a reality that did not exist.

"Well," Jacob said, breaking the silence with his usual flat, calm tone. He did not even look at the woman as he spoke. "She is the daughter of the one and only Theodore Santos. We met during one of our business trips."

The lie fell from his lips so easily it made my skin crawl.

"As in the Santos family?" the woman asked, leaning forward slightly, her diamond earrings catching the light.

I forced myself to nod, my throat tight.

She stared at me, and I could feel her eyes judging me, physically weighing my worth as they traveled up and down the ivory silk of my dress. There was no warmth in her curiosity. It was a calculation.

"I have heard a lot of rumors about the Santos family," she murmured, resting her chin on her manicured hand. "Well, not to offend you, because you look decent, but I heard from my cousin that they run an underground gang that roams Vegas at night."

My forehead wrinkled in genuine confusion. My mind instantly raced back to the cold attic, to the smell of dust, and to the way Theodore Santos treated me like a piece of garbage. An underground gang? The Santos family owned Black Label Wine. They were snobbish, cruel, and desperate for status, but a gang? It did not make sense.

"Well actually, Marionette, that is not true," a man sitting near the end of the table interrupted. He was older, with thinning hair and a gold watch that looked heavy on his wrist. "I have been friends with the Santos family for years, and those are just rumors. People say that because they started their Black Label Wines underground, out of sight. But you see, Jhannara, right?"

He paused, his sharp eyes locking onto me from across the expanse of the wood.

"I don't actually recall seeing you in the family," he said, his voice dropping into a probing, dangerous register. "You don't have any pictures in their house. It is like you do not even exist. That is why I always thought they only had one daughter."

A cold sweat broke out along my spine. Of course he would notice. I barely did exist in that household. I spent my days cleaning their floors and my nights locked away from the world. I did not even know if, up until this very moment, they even cared that I had once occupied a corner of their lives.

The silence in the room grew heavy, waiting for my answer. My heart hammered against my ribs, loud and frantic.

"I am adopted."

The word left my mouth before I could stop it. It was the only shield I had to explain why I was a ghost in my own home.

Instantly, the atmosphere in the room shifted. I could feel the sudden change in the air, the way the smiles stiffened and the whispers stopped. The reactions around the table told me everything. In a family like this, blood was currency, and being adopted meant I was worth nothing.

"You are adopted?"

The voice came from a woman sitting further down the table.

Ninna.

She was tall, and her majestic beauty was undeniable. Long, straight brunette hair fell perfectly over her shoulders, framing a face that looked completely flawless. But her dark eyes were like ice as they locked onto me. I had noticed her earlier in the evening, but she had not spoken a single word to me or to anyone else. She had simply moved through the mansion like an observer guest, watching the chaos with an icy detachment.

But now, she spoke, and the pure hostility in her tone made my breath catch.

A small, condescending smirk touched Ninna's lips as she tilted her head, staring at me with a bitter intensity that I could not understand. "Jacob Mikaelson married an adopted Santos girl? Or, should I even call you a Santos?"

The insult was quiet, but it cut through the room like a blade. Why was she acting like this? I did not even know her. I had never seen her face before in my life, yet she was looking at me with a deep, personal resentment, as if I had personally walked into her life and stolen something that belonged to her.

"Ninna," the older woman, Marionette, tried to intervene, sensing the sudden spike in temperature. "Let it go."

"Why should I?" Ninna snapped back, her voice smooth like velvet but sharp enough to draw blood. She did not raise her voice, but the sheer venom behind her words made the entire table go dead silent. She kept her eyes fixed entirely on me, completely ignoring the rest of the room. "We are a family built on legacy. Jacob is the heir to an empire. I am allowed to wonder why he brings home a girl with no history, no background, and apparently, no real place in the family she claims to come from. He was supposed to think about our future, not pick up a charity case."

The vibe in the room became incredibly suffocating. The way she said the words our future, the way her jaw clenched as she stared across the table, made it clear there was something deeper happening here. She was acting like she had a right to question Jacob, like she had a stake in his life that I had somehow disrupted.

"The choice was mine, Ninna," Jacob said.

His voice was a low, dangerous rumble that cut right through her words. He did not yell, and his face remained perfectly nonchalant, but his grey eyes were completely cold as he stared back at her. He did not offer an explanation, and he did not defend my honor with romantic words. He just stated it as an unbendable rule.

"Then you made a mistake," Ninna replied, her hands tightening on the table as her pride was wounded in front of the entire inner circle. "Look at her. She cannot even look any of us in the eye."

The argument continued in low, intense whispers across the table, a quiet, suffocating battle of words that made the entire room feel smaller. The other guests sat perfectly still, their eyes darting between Jacob and Ninna, but every few seconds, their gazes would drift over to me.

I sat completely frozen in the middle of the crossfire. A deep, heavy wave of guilt washed over me, settling into my chest like lead. They were fighting about me as if I were a piece of faulty merchandise that had been brought into their pristine house. I could feel their eyes burning into the sides of my face, judging the way I breathed, the way I held my fork, the way I existed.

At that exact moment, a terrible, crushing weight settled on my shoulders. I felt completely worthless.

In the attic, I was lonely. I was cold, and I was forgotten. But as I sat surrounded by the flashing diamonds and the expensive wine of the Mikaelson inner circle, a desperate, sobbing thought entered my mind. My life had been so much less complicated when I was a ghost. When I was locked away in the dark, nobody looked at me like I was a mistake. Nobody threw insults across a dinner table because of my blood, and I did not have to face the bitter, unexplained glare of a woman who looked like she wanted to wipe me out of existence. I was hidden, safe from the stinging judgments of people who looked down on me from their high thrones. Being completely invisible felt so much better than being trapped in the absolute center of this chaos.

I kept my head bowed, staring at the white porcelain of my plate. I wished the floor would just crack open and swallow me whole. I was an intruder in a dress that did not belong to me, carrying a name I had not earned, drowning in a world that was ready to tear me apart just for being alive.