Lucian
The room fell into a heavy silence after Tiffany finished. Her words hung in the air like smoke—thick, choking, impossible to ignore. None of us knew what to say. Darian looked at me, then Mara, silently begging one of us to step in and say something that might fix this.
But this wasn’t ours to fix.
This was his mess.
“Tiffany, please,” Mara said, her voice soft and pleading. “Reconsider.”
Tiffany turned to her, not angry—just tired.
“It’s easy for you to say, Mara. Lucian never lets you out of his sight. You’re loved. Protected. When the two of you got married, people whispered that you’d be miserable because of the rumors, but look at you now. You’re admired. Envied.”
She paused, her fingers tightening gently around her baby.
“My only crime was being naive. I genuinely tho
