Damien coughed, breaking the tension. “Zoella…won’t agree to this quietly. You’ve all seen the girl. She’s fiercer and more cunning than her sister.”
“She won’t have the option,” I replied matter-of-factly.
“You’re suggesting a forced marriage,” Isaak stammered, as though the words might break the table.
“I’m proposing preservation.” I stood then, pushing the sleeves of my jacket. “You sit here talking about losing influence, deals collapsing, and I’m presenting you with an answer. Accept it or don’t.”
Eduard settled back against the bar and exhaled smoke into the air. “And what’s your payoff in this?”
My gaze snapped to him. “This is business and nothing more.”
He thought for a while and then gave an approving nod. “It’s a good idea.”
Everyone else in the room glanced at each other, but no one dared to utter a word in disagreement. Not to Eduard, and definitely not to me. Not even Rurik; he just sat quietly with his eyes dark and fixed on something on the floor.
I looked at the others. “Set up a meeting as soon as possible. The more time passes, the easier it’ll be for the alliance to slip through our fingers.”
Or maybe I was now even more desperate to make Zoella mine. Soon, she’d be lying on my bed, bearing my last name with my ring on her finger.
I could tell with everything in me that she hated my family, and my lips quirked as I imagined her reaction to finding out she would be my wife.
She had no idea what was coming to her.
Chapter 3 – Zoella
The dress prickled my skin like a warning.
Black satin. Hugging my body. Too fancy for dinner, but when my stepmother rammed it into my arms and said, “Here, your father wants you to wear this tonight,” I didn’t have the energy to argue because whatever Blake Carter said was final.
Something in the way she refused to meet my eyes, in the way her hands trembled as she smoothed the fabric, made me shiver.
“What is this?” I asked as I took the dress from her. “Where are we going?”
“Don’t ask any questions, Zoella,” my father answered from the doorway. He strolled into my room with his hands folded behind his back. “It’s important.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Get dressed.”
So I did as they said. I got dressed in the shiny black dress they handed me. Despite the churning in my stomach and the pounding in my chest, I had to play along with whatever they wanted.
Twenty minutes had passed, and we were in the rear of a gleaming black SUV, speeding through the middle of Los Angeles. City lights whizzed by the windows, but I barely saw anything.
My brain lashed beneath my silence.
Lillian kept spinning her bracelet round and round, her eyes darting toward my father every few seconds, apparently begging him to please say something, maybe to ease the tension in the air.
He didn’t.
None of them said a damn word.
The deeper we went into the city, the more anxious I became. I knew there was something wrong. I knew there was no way this was just a fancy family dinner or a normal dinner with business partners. There had to be something more.
Air drained from my lungs when I spotted a skyscraper that was more fortress than restaurant—dark glass, black marble pillars, subtle elegance with a harsh, brutal edge.
There was no sign. No lights. Only a discreet valet and a single gold crest etched into the doors: a serpent encircling a dagger.
My gut roiled.
