The air in Peter Yates’s office was stagnant, smelling of expensive tobacco, aged scotch, and the metallic tang of Serena Ashford’s own blood where she had bitten through her lip.
She was no longer the golden child of the Ashford family. She wasn’t even the most coveted woman in Riverbend who had once commanded the attention of the city’s privileged elite with a single look. In this moment, she was something far less—a mother who had been discarded by a husband, toyed with by fate, and reduced to a beggar in a house of pleasure. She felt like a hollow shell, a piece of used property that had lost the right to be stubborn.
"Hahaha!"
Peter Yates looked down at the Contract of Indenture, watching the ink of Serena’s signature dry with the predatory satisfaction of a hunter who had finally
