This seemed to fuel her rather than calm her. She stepped forward, and her voice rose. "Who are you? Who do you think you are, you worthless, crawling little nobody, walking into our lives and dragging our daughter into your mess? You are nothing. You are less than nothing. You are the kind of man people step over on the street without looking down, and somehow you have convinced my daughter to throw away everything she has for you.""Mom," Mia said sharply.Her mother did not look at her. Her eyes were fixed on Alex with the concentrated fury of someone who had been storing pressure all night and had finally found a release valve. "Because of you, we have no house. Because of you, we have no status. Because of you, my daughter went against her own grandfather and now we are standing in a stranger's apartment with nothing. Nothing! Do you understand what that means for people like us?"Her father found his footing again in the shared outrage. He straightened against the wall, his voice

Mia felt the heat crawling up the back of her neck.She had been managing this, holding herself in check, measuring her words, doing everything she could to keep the conversation from spiraling into something they could not come back from.But there was a limit.There was always a limit, and she could feel herself pressing against it now, the way water presses against a dam that has already started cracking.She turned to Alex.He was standing exactly where he had been standing through all of it. Silent. Still.His expression carrying nothing she could read, nothing he was offering up for anyone in the room to use.He was simply there, absorbing it, the way a person absorbs a storm when they know the storm is not really about them.And yet Mia knew, with a certainty that came from somewhere deeper than logic, that every word her parents had hurled at him had landed. He was just choosing not to bleed where they could see it.That thought alone made something inside her ache worse than

Alex did not blink.He stood with his eyes fixed on Mia's mother, and there was nothing readable in his face, no irritation, no offense taken, no flicker of the kind of emotion she had clearly been trying to provoke.Just a flat, unbroken stillness that was somehow more unsettling than any raised voice could have been.The coldness that had settled into him when he watched Mia's cheek redden had not left.If anything it had deepened, spreading quietly through every part of him the way ice spreads across still water, slow and total and impossible to stop once it starts.Mia's mother had not finished her sentence.He stepped forward and cut through the rest of it before she could get there."No one," Alex said, his voice so even it almost sounded gentle, "will force me into anything. Not you. Not Tom Vinda. Not anyone standing in this apartment or outside of it." He held her gaze without effort. "You can threaten me from now until the end of your days, and every single one of those thre

Her mother blinked."As long as I am here," Alex continued, his tone carrying the flat certainty of someone stating something they have already decided and have no interest in revisiting, "Simone will never come near Mia. And just so you understand the full picture." He paused, letting the quiet stretch for exactly the right amount of time. "Simone is nothing compared to me."The room went completely silent.Mia's mother stared at him. Her father, who had been hovering near Mia in helpless silence this entire time, turned his head slowly toward Alex with an expression that could not decide between disbelief and something that looked, buried

Her voice climbed higher. "And it was never enough. It was never going to be enough because what they wanted was not a person, they wanted a product. Something they could package and sell and use to make connections."Her father said nothing, just held her."I disappeared," Mia continued, the words tumbling out now without order or restraint. "I stopped being myself somewhere along the way and I did not even notice it happening. I became whatever grandfather needed me to be at any given moment. Professional Mia for the board meetings. Obedient Mia for the family dinners. Grateful Mia when he reminded me how lucky I was to have his support." She pulled back enough to look at her father, her face streaked with tears, her eyes red and swollen. "I shrank myself down to fit into a space that was never meant for me in the first place. And yesterday proved it. Yesterday he sent men to drag me across the floor like I was property, and you know what the worst part is?"Her father shook his hea