The air in the penthouse crackled with the static of impending doom. Demetri stood frozen in the doorway of his war room, his gaze a physical weight pinning Nora in place. He had seen the horror on her face, the damning tablet in her hand. He knew a secret of catastrophic proportions was hovering in the space between them.
In that split second, a lifetime of calculations flashed behind Nora’s eyes. Telling him the truth—that his daughter was a product of a traumatic event involving his own brutal father—would be like throwing a lit match into a room filled with dynamite. It would annihilate the man who had painstakingly built himself from the ashes of his past. It would poison his every look at Sasha, turning her from a daughter into a ghost of his father’s sins.
But the lie… the lie was
