Page 45 of A Vicious Love

I held my clutch with both hands.

“I didn’t want to waste your time,” I said.

There was a shift behind his eyes. As if the sentence had gone somewhere he had not armored properly.

His phone rang. The sound cut through the moment. I looked down at the screen lighting in his hand.

Crow business. I knew he would answer it.

I could have stood there while he chose the phone in front of me, then hurt myself by pretending the choice had nothing to do with me.

Instead, I saved him the trouble.

“I’ll leave you to it,” I said.

He looked from the ringing phone to me.

“Sienna.”

I nodded once. Then I turned and walked away.

Veil drones filmed the shining new empire Jamison Crow had built while something in me quietly learned how to leave it.

I did not look back until I reached the private entrance. Through the reflection in the black glass door, I saw him still standing where I had left him.

Phone ringing in his hand.

Eyes on me.

Then the guard opened the door.

My driver waited at the curb. I got into the car before Jamison could answer his phone.

Or before I could hear him choose it.

CHAPTER SEVEN

SIENNA

My cousin married into the Aurelius dynasty on a Tuesday. Only dynasties could make a weekday wedding feel like a coronation. The ceremony was held beneath a glass canopy at the Bellemere eastern estate, with flowers imported from other countries. Enough gold detailing to make the whole afternoon look like sunlight had been forced to behave.

My cousin looked beautiful. I hated that my first thought was not happiness.

It should have been.

Elodie had always been kind to me in the careless way, that successful girls were kind when they had never been made to feel like a debt.

She kissed my cheek before the ceremony and whispered that my dress looked lovely, and I told her she looked like a painting.

She did.

A perfect dynasty painting.

By the time she reached the end of the aisle, her father was already being congratulated by men who measured daughters in treaties and sons in bloodlines.

The Aurelius merger was a good one.

No.