Page 50 of Sins of the Father
Mia’s throat tightened. “How… how did they reach me here?”
A flicker of something dark crossed his face. “That’s what I need to find out. Until then, you trust no one.”
Her stomach twisted into a knot. His hand closed over hers, his thumb tracing the cold band of her wedding ring.
“You’re my wife,” Luc said, the words both a vow and a warning. His eyes held hers, unflinching. “Anyone who touches you dies. ”
Mia’s fingers trembled beneath his. She wanted to believe him. She wanted to feel safe. The desire was a fragile, fleeting thing. Raw emotions she barely understood writhed inside her chest.
“What if I wanted to leave?” she whispered, the words tearing loose from a place of deep fear and pain and uncertainty. “I don’t want this life. Ineverwanted it. I don’t want to question who I can trust in my own home. I don’t understand how you live like this. Always on edge, always expecting danger—knowing someone could come for you, or for the people you love, at any moment and kill them. How do you stand it? How do you want to bring children into a world like that?How?”
He cupped her cheeks, one of his thumbs caressing the corner of her mouth. “One cannot just leave this life, Mia.”
The words landed like a tombstone in her chest. “I… what?”
Something cold and cruel flashed in his gaze, and Mia knew, with a cold certainty that stopped her heart, it wasn’t a threat. It was a law. The brutal, unyielding law of his world. And suddenly, it wasn’t the attack that terrified her—it washim.
“What does that mean, Luc, what does that mean?” She wanted him to say it because she did not want to live with an assumption. “Is this why you want me to fall in love with you?”
He looked at her with dead eyes and said nothing. Mia’s belly cramped, hating him in this moment, hating how much she hungered for him, hating how scared and uncertain she felt.
“I need to be alone. ” The words were a frayed thread of sound.
Luc stilled, the tension in the room sharp enough to cut. He seemed to want to argue, to pull her back from the chasm that had just opened between them. She shook her head. “Please. I need space to think… to… think, okay?”
After a pause that stretched into eternity, he nodded once, his jaw a hard line. Luc pressed his lips to her forehead and then stepped back. He turned around and walked away. The door clicked shut, and the silence he left behind was a physical weight. She sank to the floor as the sobs came—raw, unrestrained.
Was he truly saying that if she ever tried to leave, someone would kill her?
You could still try and run, a voice whispered through her heart.Bide your time as planned, learn, and save money… he would never expect it.
A sharp pain wrenched through her chest, and Mia laughed. The idea of leaving him and the relationship they had started to build hurt. Could she live in a world where love bowed to rules, and an attack could come at any time? She didn't know. The onlycertainty was the weight of the ring on her finger, and the scars it would brand upon her soul to survive.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Mia sat on the edge of her bed, her father’s watch burning in her palm. A few days had passed since the attack, and the pain and aches in her body were starting to fade. She’d asked for space, and Luc had given it to her. Mia hardly saw him, and she had mixed feelings about it. A part of her appreciated the distance, and another part craved his presence.
His reminder echoed in her ear:One cannot just leave this life, Mia.
She was already in the labyrinth and could not leave. Her only way forward was to trust the man who held its map. Her decision was not a thought but a shift—a quiet, irrevocable click in her soul. She would not hide or be afraid. Her fingers trembled slightly as she reached for her phone and sent a single message:Luc, can you come to me?
Moments later, her bedroom door opened, and he crossed into the room, controlled and unreadable. His dark eyes lifted to hers, the space seeming to shrink with his presence. “You look better. Good.”
“I feel less pain,” she said, her voice steadier than the tremor in her bones. “The doctor has done an incredible job.”
She stepped closer to him, drinking in his handsomeness. It bemused her that she had missed being in his arms and close to him where she felt safe. Without a word, she lifted the watch. The softclickof the compartment opening echoed like a gunshot in the quiet. Inside the watch, the small microchip glinted—a sliver of cold, dormant power. Such a small thing to hold the weight of empires.
Mia extended her hand, the open watch resting on her palm. Luc’s dark eyes flicked to the chip, then back to her face. For a heartbeat, the air between them charged, taut as a wire.
“This is what my family would have tortured me for,” she said softly.
“Yes,” he said, his voice low. For a single, unguarded moment, raw, voracious hunger contorted his features—a glimpse of the beast beneath the skin. Then it was gone, shuttered behind a mask of careful neutrality.
“And you… it will help you gain more power, as you said, swallow what is left of my family without bloodshed.”
“Yes.”
“You once said you could torture me for it. Why didn’t you?”
