SHATTERED THRONE

The Hands That Take Her

Petra's men move fast — the kind of fast that comes from practice, from doing this before, from doing it many times before. The larger one has Mara's left arm before she can step back, fingers locking around her wrist like a manacle, and the shock of it — real, physical, inescapable — detonates through her chest.

This is not a threat anymore. This is the execution of a plan.

She doesn't scream. Her mind won't let her. It's already counting: two men, one fixer, Dorian Voss between her and the ballroom door, Caiden standing six feet to her left with his hands open at his sides and an expression on his face that she has no word for. Not guilt. Past guilt. Something that looks like a man watching a building fall that he himself designed.

"Don't," Caiden says. It is the quietest word she has ever heard him speak.

Petra doesn't even look at him. "Mr. Voss gave the instruction."

"I'm telling you to stop."

"You're telling me." Petra's voice carries the flat amusement of someone who has never once in her life been required to take Caiden Voss seriously. "Your father will want to speak with you after. For now, please go inside."

Sela makes a sound. A small, broken animal sound from the corner of the terrace, where she has pressed herself against the stone railing as if she could dissolve into it. Her eyes are locked on Mara's. They are the same eyes. The same shade of green, the same shape, and right now they are flooding with everything Sela has not been allowed to say for six weeks.

Mara looks at her twin and makes a decision in under a second: do not use that.

Sela is suffering. Sela is blackmailed, compromised, drowning in guilt so thick Mara can smell it. Using her sister's anguish as a lever — screaming for help, forcing Sela to act, manufacturing a scene — might work. It also might get Sela killed. Dorian Voss has already demonstrated tonight that he operates without a ceiling on consequence.

So Mara does not scream. She goes still.

The man holding her arm tightens his grip at the sudden stillness, expecting struggle, recalibrating when there is none. Good. Let him recalibrate. Let all of them recalibrate.

"Mr. Voss." She addresses Dorian directly. Her voice comes out steady. She is absurdly proud of this. "If you intended to simply disappear me, you would have done it before the vows. That means you need something from me. Or from my father's files. Or both."

Dorian regards her the way a man regards a chess piece that has unexpectedly moved itself. Something in his expression shifts — not respect, not quite, but a recalibration of his own. "Clever girl," he says. "Aldous's daughter after all."

"Tell me what you want."

"Mara." Caiden's voice cracks on her name. One syllable. Raw as an open wound.

"Don't." She doesn't look at him. She cannot afford to look at him. "Whatever you were about to say — don't say it here."

Dorian tilts his head slightly. Studying her. The second poisoned glass is still in his hand, and he considers it for a moment before setting it on the stone ledge beside him with the careful deliberateness of a man who has decided the moment for theater has passed.

"There are documents," he says. "Your father's original audit files from the Meridian account. Aldous being the meticulous man he is, kept personal copies. We were unable to locate them before his arrest. We have since learned he left them with you."

Mara's mind goes very quiet.

She does have them. She has had them for three years, sealed in an envelope she has never opened, tucked inside the lining of a portfolio bag in the back of her closet, because her father pressed them into her hands the morning of his arrest and said only: keep these safe, Mara-mine, keep them very safe. She has kept them safe. She has kept them safe through three years of visiting him in prison every Sunday and watching the light thin out of him, and she has never once opened them because opening them felt like admitting she believed he needed saving.

She believed he needed saving.

She just didn't know from whom.

"And if I give them to you," she says, "what happens to my father?"

"He serves his sentence."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only answer you're getting tonight." Dorian straightens his cufflinks — a gesture so mundane it is obscene. "You can make this very simple, Mara. Tell me where the files are. Sign a document confirming their destruction. Take your place as Caiden's wife and live a very comfortable life. Or—" he gestures slightly toward Petra's men, toward the cliff beyond the railing, toward the dark water far below, "—this evening ends differently."

Sela makes another sound. This one she cannot contain.

"Papa." Felix's voice comes from the ballroom doorway — and every person on the terrace freezes. Caiden's younger brother stands at the threshold in his evening jacket, champagne glass loose in one hand, taking in the scene with an expression cycling rapidly from confusion to something uncertain. "They're asking for the family inside. The photographer—"

He stops. He is twenty-four years old and he has grown up in the shadow of his father's empire and he has never once, Mara suspects, seen the machinery this clearly. The two men holding her. Petra's closed, professional face. Caiden standing apart like a man serving a sentence of his own.

"Felix." Dorian's voice smooths instantly into warmth. "Give us one moment."

Felix does not move.

His eyes find Mara's. And something passes between them — not recognition, not yet, but a question. A c***k in the wall of Voss certainty so thin it barely admits light.

In that sliver of distraction — Felix in the doorway, Dorian turned three degrees toward his younger son, Petra's attention fractured — Caiden moves.

He crosses to Mara in two steps and closes his hand over hers. Not gently. Urgently. His pulse hammers against her fingers, and she feels it the way she felt it on the dance floor, that terrified living heartbeat, and he bends close enough that his words are only for her.

"The cliffs. East side. There's a maintenance path. When I create the opening — run. Do not look back for me. Do you understand?"

She stares at him.

His eyes are the most honest thing she has seen all night. Maybe the most honest thing she has ever seen on his face. And she thinks of Sela whispering just have this one night, and Dorian's certainty, and her father's files, and the sound of the water below, and every calculation she has been running since the moment she walked into this ballroom.

"Why should I trust you?" she breathes.

His jaw tightens. Something ancient and anguished moves behind his eyes.

"You shouldn't," he says. "Run anyway."