I could love a man with a scarred past, but I would not spend my future with a ghost haunted by it.
The silence in the penthouse was a physical presence, thick and suffocating, like ash after a fire. Three days. Three days since I’d laid his mother’s final, damning secret at his feet, and Lysander Blackwood had simply… shut down. The formidable billionaire had been replaced by a specter who paced the titanium-and-glass confines of his fortress, his eyes seeing a horror I could only imagine.
I found him standing before the floor-to-ceiling window, the glittering cityscape a tapestry of cold, distant lights that did nothing to illuminate the shadows clinging to him. A crystal glass of amber whiskey dangled from his fingers, forgotten.
“You can’t just haunt your own home forever, Lysander,
