POV: Xavier
The silence in the library after his father’s offer was absolute, broken only by the greedy crackle of the fire. Xavier heard the words, parsed their meaning, and felt a cold, sick fury rise from the pit of his stomach. Personal Archivist. It was a masterstroke. It wasn’t just a surveillance post. It was an annexation. His father wasn’t merely putting a collar on Isabella; he was offering to weave her into the very tapestry of the lie, to make her a silken thread in the family’s false history. He was buying her silence with a salary, her curiosity with access, and her soul with security.
He could see the calculation behind her eyes, the rapid, terrifying shift from fear to a kind of frozen analysis. "No," he thought at her, screaming it silently across the two feet of Persian
