The journey back to my estate was a silent, suffocating ordeal. The shame was a physical thing, a branding iron on my soul. On Kaelen’s yacht, I had been reduced to a kneeling supplicant, my power a cheap party trick in the face of his monolithic authority. But it wasn’t his dominance that haunted me. It was the look on Elara’s face. That glacial indifference. She hadn’t been a prisoner flaunting her new captor; she had been a queen surveying her new domain. A domain she had chosen. A throne she had earned.
The master key, my key, sinking into that champagne flute… that single, elegant gesture was more devastating than a thousand bullets. It was a declaration of severance. She had cut me out of her life as cleanly as she would have excised a tumor.
When my car swept through the iron gate
