Chapter 36
The mansion was too quiet. The kind of silence that wasn't peaceful, but suffocating. Sydney stood still, her reflection in the gilded mirror barely recognizable. She was dressed in black—elegant, flawless—but the hollowness in her eyes betrayed her. The mask she wore was fragile, threatening to crack under the weight of everything she had become. Grief had settled into her bones, not the sharp ache of mourning, but a cold, dull pain that never left. Her mother was gone. And in her place, Sydney now stood at the edge of an empire that had never been meant for her. At least not in their eyes. She walked through the mansion's halls, her footsteps echoing. The staff nodded respectfully, but she could feel it—the tension, the uncertainty, the whispered questions they didn't dare speak a
- Writer
