Dante forced my crippled right hand onto the scanner. The cold glass was a slap of reality against the scarred, useless flesh. He believed Camilla’s lies—that I, Elara, the woman who designed his family’s impenetrable security, had betrayed his father. Now, he demanded my public confession. To protect my sister, Mia, I had to swallow the razor blades of this humiliation and admit to a treason I never committed. I had to watch as my fiancé’s eyes, once full of a fierce, possessive warmth, turned to black ice.
"Scan it," Dante’s voice was low, each word a shard of obsidian. We were in the heart of the fortress, a sterile, white server room that hummed with the power I had once commanded. Now, it was my cage.
My right hand, the one he had once held to his heart and claimed held the keys to
