Vows of Vengeance

Chapter5

Aria didn’t flinch.

She didn’t gasp or grab the sheet tighter around herself or look at Dominic with wounded eyes waiting to be rescued from an uncomfortable moment.

She stood straight. Shoulders back. Chin level. And looked at her sister with the calm focused expression of a woman who had already survived the worst thing Celeste could do to her and was therefore completely unafraid of whatever came next.

“Good morning, Celeste,” she said.

Her sister’s perfectly composed face cracked slightly at the edges. She had clearly prepared for tears. For panic. For the satisfying spectacle of Aria falling apart at the sight of her. She had not prepared for this — for Aria standing in a man’s penthouse at seven in the morning looking like she belonged there entirely.

Celeste stepped inside without being invited.

Dominic closed the door behind her.

Aria noted that he positioned himself to her left — not in front of her, not between them like a barrier. Beside her. Like a partner taking his position rather than a man managing a difficult situation.

She noted it. Said nothing.

“How long,” Aria said. Her voice was even and unhurried. A question asked from strength, not desperation.

Celeste’s eyes moved between them carefully. “How long what?”

“How long have you known Dominic?”

Celeste straightened. Adjusted. Aria watched her sister do what she had always done — reorganize her expression, select her angle, choose which version of the truth served her best in this particular moment. She had watched Celeste perform this calculation their entire lives and had always been too generous to name it clearly.

“Four months,” Celeste said. She looked at Dominic. “We met at the Harrington Foundation gala. You were there because of Cross. I was there because Marcus brought me.” She let that land deliberately — the casual cruelty of reminding Aria that Marcus had been taking her sister to public events long before last night. “We talked. We kept talking after.”

“About what specifically?” Aria asked.

“About Cross. About Father. About the situation.” Celeste stopped.

“About me,” Aria said quietly.

Celeste didn’t deny it.

Aria turned to Dominic. No storming. No raised voice. Just clear direct eyes and one straight question.

“You knew her before last night.”

“Yes,” he said.

One word. Nothing wrapped around it. No excuse attached.

She appreciated the honesty even as it landed with considerable weight.

“Was meeting me planned?” she asked.

“No.” Firm and immediate. “Celeste mentioned you would be at the rehearsal dinner. She didn’t tell me where you would go afterward. I did not know you would walk into that bar.”

“But you recognized me immediately when I sat down.”

“Yes.”

Aria held his gaze for a long moment. She was running calculations — not emotional ones, precise ones. Assembling what she knew against what she had been told against what she had observed with her own eyes since waking up.

Then she turned back to her sister.

“What did you want from him?” she asked. “Specifically.”

Celeste’s composure slipped another fraction. “I wanted help. Father’s situation with Cross was getting worse and Marcus wasn’t going to do anything about it. I found out Dominic had been investigating Cross and I reached out to him.” She paused. “I thought if I brought him useful information he would help me get out from under all of it.”

“Get out,” Aria said. “Just you.”

Celeste said nothing.

“Not Father. Not me. Just yourself.” Aria’s voice remained completely level. “Same as always.”

The words landed clean and precise and didn’t require volume to cut deeply.

Celeste’s jaw tightened. “You don’t understand what it has been like. You were always the favorite. The gentle one. The good one. I was the one Father used for every difficult conversation, every bad decision, every hard thing he didn’t want to handle himself—”

“I was sold to pay his debt,” Aria said quietly. “So please don’t tell me about difficult.”

The room went completely still.

Celeste opened her mouth. Closed it again.

For the first time since walking through that door she looked genuinely uncomfortable. Not performing discomfort — actually sitting inside it. The specific discomfort of a woman who has told herself a story about being the real victim for so long that she stopped seeing what her survival was costing the people around her.

Aria turned away from her sister. Not dramatically. Simply — finished. The way you close a door on a room you have decided not to spend any more energy on.

She looked at Dominic.

“I need everything Celeste told you,” she said. “Every detail. Every name. Every piece of information she brought you about my family.” She paused. “Not because I don’t trust you. Because I need the complete picture before I can build anything solid and I refuse to work from an incomplete blueprint.”

Something moved through Dominic’s expression — deep and genuine and not particularly well hidden.

“Everything,” he said. “You will have all of it.”

She nodded once. Then she looked at Celeste with eyes that were completely clear and entirely dry.

“You should go,” she said.

Celeste blinked. “Aria—”

“I’m not angry with you.” She meant it completely, which made it the most powerful thing she could have said. “I’m not going to scream or make this into a scene. But I need you to understand something very clearly.” She held her sister’s gaze without blinking. “Whatever you came here to find this morning — whatever you expected when you knocked on that door — it isn’t here. I am not the version of myself you built your plans around anymore.”

Celeste stared at her for a long moment.

Then she looked at Dominic with an expression that was one part fury and two parts something that looked, underneath all of it, like genuine envy.

“You chose well,” she said to him quietly. It was not a compliment. It was a concession from a woman who recognized when she had lost something she could not get back.

She picked up her bag and walked out without another word.

The door clicked shut behind her.

The penthouse settled back into its quiet morning. Aria stood in the middle of the room, sheet around her shoulders, ring on her finger, gold light crossing the floors.

Dominic was watching her.

“You’re not going to ask me if I have feelings for her,” he said.

“No.” She turned to face him fully. “I’m going to ask you something more important. Is there anything else connecting you to my life before last night? Anything at all?”

He was quiet for exactly three seconds.

“Yes,” he said.

Her eyes didn’t move from his. “Tell me.”

He crossed the room and stopped in front of her. Close enough that she had to look up slightly to hold his gaze. Close enough that she could feel his warmth and remember with unhelpful clarity exactly what that warmth had felt like hours ago.

“My mentor James Thorne,” he said quietly.

“Yes.”

“Your father didn’t simply do business near Cross while Thorne’s company was being destroyed.” The muscle in his jaw moved once. “Your father was the one who introduced Cross to James Thorne in the first place.”

The morning light felt suddenly very bright.

“So my father fed someone else to Cross before Cross came for him,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And that someone was the man who was everything to you.”

“Yes.”

She held his gaze steadily. The air between them carried the full weight of what that meant — for his history, for her family, for whatever this strange deliberate thing between them was trying to become.

“When you saw me walk into that bar last night,” she said quietly. “The daughter of the man who destroyed your mentor. What was your very first instinct?”

He didn’t look away.

“To leave,” he said honestly.

“And your second?”

He looked at her for a long moment. The morning light caught his eyes and for once there was nothing calculated in them at all.

“To stay,” he said.

Aria looked at him for a long time.

Then she turned toward the bedroom.

“I need to shower and get dressed,” she said. “Then you are going to sit across from me at that kitchen table and tell me absolutely everything. Starting from the very beginning with nothing left out.” She paused at the doorway and looked back at him over her shoulder. “And Dominic — if I discover there is a third thing you have been keeping from me, I won’t need Cross or Marcus or anyone else.”

She let the silence hold for one beat.

“I’ll handle you entirely by myself.”

She walked into the bedroom and closed the door quietly behind her.

Dominic stood alone in the middle of his penthouse.

For the first time in three years of careful controlled perfectly executed planning he smiled. Fully. Completely. Like a man who had just realized his plan had become something far more interesting than he designed it to be.

Then he picked up his phone.

A new message was on the screen. Not from Celeste. Not from Cross.

From a number that had been silent for over two years.

He read it once.

The smile disappeared entirely.

She is Robert Calloway’s daughter. Walk away now. You have absolutely no idea what you have married into.