Page 139 of The Rust in Her Hair

"How dare you!" Lavinia growls.

"You can threaten me all night." Adrian meets her rage. "You can wave that phone around and talk about lawyers. It doesn't change a single thing. She's mine, she's mated, and she's not going anywhere with either of you." He points a finger between the two of them. "So both of you can go to hell."

My father yells something back, but I can’t hear him. All I can see is Crispin inching a little bit closer. When he speaks his voice is low and steady, aimed straight past Adrian at me, like no one else is in the room.

"Lyra. Look at me, omega." His voice is soft, almost tender, and it makes my stomach heave. "I understand what happened. You were taken, and you were forced, and none of it was your fault."

Adrian doesn't move. He stands there, a wall between us, his hand reaching back to press flat and warm against my hip as my father threatens him again.

"I forgive you," Crispin goes on, and I feel sick. "Do you hear me? I forgive you. It shames me to think of it, some filthy laborer putting his hands on you, rutting you like an animal, but I don't hold it against you." His voice hardens. "I have the best lawyers in the country. We can have this mating annulled, the claim thrown out, all of it undone. You can be clean again. You can still be mine."

"You need to back the fuck up," Adrian says, finally seeing Crispin. Every word comes out slow and deliberate, and I can feel the effort it's costing him to keep his voice level. "All of you. Right now."

"She deserves better than filth." My mother's lip curls as she looks Adrian up and down, taking in his simple dress shirt, his boots, and his callused hands. "My daughter is a Van Houten. She was never meant to spend her life with a man who comes home with dirt under his nails. Look at her!" Her voice turns shrill. "She looks like a common whore in that dress!"

And something in me finally gives.

A sob breaks loose from my throat, before I can swallow it back down, and Adrian snaps.

"Enough!"

The roar tears out of him and fills the whole room, rattling something on the desk, and everyone goes silent at once. Even Crispin. Even my mother.

"I have tried to be polite." His voice has dropped into something low and lethal, scraped raw at the bottom. "I have stood here and let all of you say your piece." His chest heaves against my hands. "But I promise you, the next alpha who so much as looks at my mate again, I will put in the ground. I don't give a damn whose house this is."

Then the office door swings open once again.

Nico steps in, and his face is filled with alarm. Breathless and urgent.

"Mr. Van Houten." He looks straight at my father. "There's a problem. Someone knocked a candle into the drapes near the east terrace, the whole thing caught, and your guests are starting to panic. The staff can't find you anywhere."

Aldric goes rigid. A fire, at his event, in front of a few hundred of the most important people he knows.

"Christ." My father curses, then he moves.

But my mother hesitates. Her pale eyes cut to me, and for one second, she just stands there.

She looks at me the way she'd look at a stain on the carpet. At the mark on my throat, the borrowed dress, and the alpha shielding me with his body.

“I always knew you would end up like this," she says quietly. "A century of this family’s powerful legacy, and it comes down to you, rutted by some commoner in a cheap dress." Her lips barely move. "I spent a fortune making you presentable, and this is what you chose." She shakes her head. "What a waste. What an absolute waste of a name."The words should gut me. And some small, young part of me, the eleven-year-old who still lives somewhere under my ribs, does flinch.

But Nico's warmth is still pouring down our bond, and Adrian is a wall at my side, and I've heard some version of this speech my whole life. So it doesn't really phase me this time.

"Mrs. Van Houten." Nico's voice sharpens. "The Hensleys are out there. Half the board is watching your house burn while the staff runs in circles. If you want them to remember anything but this, you need to be out there now."

That does it.

Something shifts behind her eyes, cold calculation winning out over everything else, and then she's gone, sweeping out of the room in a rush of expensive fabric.

And I realize, as the door swings shut behind her, that I feel nothing at all. That's the last thing my mother will ever say to me, and it doesn't even hurt.

"Sir," Nico moves to Crispin, but he doesn't move.

Crispin stays exactly where he is, his gray eyes still fixed on me over Adrian's shoulder, like a fire is beneath his notice.

Nico crosses to him. "Sir. You'll want to clear the room." His voice is calm, reasonable. "This way."

Crispin doesn't so much as glance at him. "Lyra⁠—"