The moment Elias Vance finished speaking, the banquet hall fell into absolute silence. Not a whisper, not the clink of a glass. Some of the guests had stopped breathing entirely, their champagne flutes frozen halfway to their lips.
Arthur Vance had been a titan in his day. A single stamp of his foot could send tremors through all of Cresthaven. But even Arthur, at the peak of his power, had never been brazen enough to openly challenge every elite family in the city at once.
And now his sworn brother, this man who had appeared from nowhere, had done precisely that. He had declared war on every powerful house involved in the conspiracy, a proclamation so wildly arrogant it bordered on insanity. By any rational measure, the smart play would have been to co-opt some factions, suppress others
