Page 234 of A Vicious Love

I smiled. “Say that again.”

He paused, his mouth slowly opening.

“Careful,” I said softly. “I want to know if you’re stupid enough to say it twice.”

The color in his face faded. He looked toward the trees. No one there.

“I made a practical decision,” he said.

“No. You made a decision behind my back.”

“The review was opened by the Crow side.”

“By Damius.”

“Damius is Crow.”

I stepped closer. He stopped breathing for a second.

“Not me.”

The distinction mattered.

Legally, Damius could open, close, and bury any family commitment under Crow jurisdiction if the right clauses existed. Damius did not need my permission.

But Sienna had stood beside me for three years.

Me.

She had taken the public weight of my name, absence, cruelty, my refusal to marry her, my refusal to release her, my refusal to do anything clean with the life she had been forced to place near mine.

They did not get to move her like a chair when I finally turned around.

“I was told,” her father said carefully, “that you did not object.”

“I lied.”

His eyes lifted to mine.

“You lied.”

“Yes.”

“To Damius.”

“Yes.”

“That is… unfortunate.”

I laughed once. “For whom?”

He did not answer.

Good.

He had some instinct left.

I moved around him slowly, letting him stand in the middle of the clearing while I circled him. Men like him understood boardrooms and dinner tables. They did not understand being circled in pine mist by a man who had hunted worse things than deer before breakfast.