The muffled celebration inside the hotel suddenly seemed to belong to another lifetime, replaced by the deafening beat of Victor’s own heart.
“Did your grandmother really force you to leave?” Victor asked, his voice low and vibrating with dangerous intensity.
Annie nodded slowly as tears cut clean tracks through the dirt on her cheeks.
“She told Mom that she wasn’t good enough to be a part of our family anymore,” she recounted.
“She also whispered that you didn’t love us anymore and that we should just disappear so you could move on.”
Something inside Victor, the part of him that had been cold and businesslike for years, snapped like a fault line shifting beneath the earth.
He lifted Annie into his arms and marched toward the main ballroom entrance, his face hardened into cold steel.
The room was packed with the city’s elite, men in tailored tuxedos and women covered in diamonds, all laughing and drinking in honor of Maris Williams.
