The phones wouldn’t stop. My chest wouldn’t stop tightening.
I looked at him. “We should’ve left.”
Luca’s eyes flicked to me. “I thought that the moment she stepped on the dock.”
I pushed back against the seat, jaw locked, fists tight on my thighs. “I want her home,” I muttered. “I want her in our fucking bed. We leave shit like this, and we go home to her.”
I reached out, took the cigarette from his fingers, dragged the smoke deep until it burned my lungs.
I wanted our peace back with our girl.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
EMILIA
The table was set for three. My brother’s chair remained empty.
“Alexander sends his apologies,” Alaric said lightly, as if my brother’s absence were a small weather inconvenience. “Something urgent. He thought it best we continue without him.”
I nodded. The room felt wrong. Alexander’s penthouse was supposed to be an extension of him—every polished surface carrying his order. With Alaric sitting at the head, it felt less like home and more like a table already set for negotiation.
We spoke first of polite things. The hotel’s construction schedule. The delay in the suite below ours. How long he would be staying with us until it opened. He smiled easily, though there was calculation in the way his eyes lingered on mine—as if he were reading not just my words but what I withheld between them.
It didn’t take long for the conversation to turn.
“The Accord is weighty,” he said. “But the spine will hold if the right heirs continue it.”
“Children,” I said evenly. “Not heirs.”
A faint lift of his brow, the ghost of a smile. “Of course. Children.”
But he didn’t mean it. He spoke with the certainty of someone who’d only ever known lineage as law.
I leaned forward. “I’ve already made my terms clear to my family. If I marry—if there are children—they will be raised by me. Not by handlers. Not by dynasty tutors. Decisions about education, security, health—those will be mine.”
He set his fork down. “That is… not tradition.”
“Neither is love,” I said quietly. “And yet children need it more than tradition.”
For the first time, his composure changed. “Dynastic children belong to more than their mothers. They belong to the house. To the Dynasty bloodline.”
“My child will belong to me,” I corrected. My voice didn’t rise. I wouldn’t let him mistake calm for weakness.
He studied me. A long silence followed.
“Our children,” he said at last. “Ours will be raised with discipline.”
The word landed like a cut.Ours.
It echoed in my chest, terrifying. For a second, I couldn’t feel the room around me—the candles, the wine, the white linen. Only that single word tightening around me like a claim I hadn’t agreed to.
I swallowed carefully. My face stayed still. Inside, that was different.
I let out a slow breath. “If you think discipline is the opposite of a mother’s authority, then you misunderstand me. I’m not asking for indulgence. I’m asking for protection. That requires rules. Rules made by the one who carries the child, not the one who names it.”
His mouth lifted, faint and unreadable.
“Most daughters,” he said finally, “concern themselveswith gowns and guest lists. You concern yourself with guardianship. It’s… admirable.”
