CHAPTER 32: The moment Jensen walked through the doors, the room stilled.It happened in stages.The nearest cluster first, then the next, a ripple of paused conversations and recalibrated glances spreading outward from the entrance until the hum of the hall had dropped by half. All eyes scrutinized his outfit. Like he had stepped into a room that wasn’t meant for him. He’d worn it deliberately: dark trousers, a clean shirt, no tie, no jacket, nothing that acknowledged the black-tie dress code in any way that could be called accidental. Charlotte was beside him in midnight blue, the dress catching every chandelier in the room with each step she took. She looked gorgeous. As always.Geena was inside the main hall, mid-handshake with a silver-haired man. She spotted Jensen first, and then Charlotte.Her smile faded while she watched the pair.A moment later, she crossed the hall to meet them as the chatter resumed.“Big brother, You didn’t mention a plus one,” she said to Jensen, e

CHAPTER 34“If everyone would please find their seats, dinner is ready to be served.”Geena suddenly announced. Her voice broke Priscilla’s dark thoughts.While the energy of the room shifted immediately, Priscilla moved faster than anyone, disappearing from Jensen and Charlotte’s side.She crossed the hall at a steady pace and headed to the table she’d specifically requested earlier. Beside the heir. But when she got there, she stopped.“What the fuck is this?” She muttered.The name card that should have been beside the heir’s designated seat, the one she’d specifically requested, wasn’t there. The arrangement had been changed, cleanly and completely, as if her request had never been submitted at all. A different card sat in its place. Priscilla read out its name. “Charlotte Woodart.”Priscilla picked it up between two fingers, read it twice, and set it back down with disgust.“That bitch.”Geena appeared before her within seconds. She wore a smile. But Priscilla wasn’t intere

CHAPTER 36The car zoomed off.Jensen sat in the back with his jacket still on and his phone face-down on the seat beside him, watching the city give way to the hospital district.Charlotte was quiet beside him. Like she had stumbled into a part of his mysterious family and didn’t know how to handle that. The car took a final turn and landed on the hospital curb. All on board quickly came down. Madeline was waiting at the entrance to Hargrove Memorial.She was a woman in her sixties who’d spent forty years managing Alfred Pike’s household. And for decades, she has been head maid.“Young master,” she said to Jensen as he approached her and bowed to him.“Where is he?” Jensen asked.“Please follow me,” she added.Just then, Geena’s car parked beside Jensen’s as well. She came down and quickly followed the pair. Madeline led them through the lobby, past the reception desk where someone started to say something about visitor protocols and thought better of it when they looked at the pe

Chapter 38The inside of the building was nothing like the outside.That was the first thing Charlotte noticed. The deliberate contrast between the ordinary exterior and what it contained.Charlotte walked through rooms she absorbed without processing, her mind already on what was ahead, filing everything around her as peripheral.This was a brothel. Lots and lots of naked girls danced and ran their hands on the male patrons. Some of them were being beaten, cursed at and humiliated. Charlotte shuddered. Brian walked ahead of her. He neither looked back to check if she was following nor spoke to fill the silence. He didn’t need to do either. They both understood she had nowhere else to go.The room he brought her to was smaller than she’d expected. There was theater in it. Just a room with good furniture and bad air and a man sitting at a table at the centre of the room. The Godfather looked older in this light. He looked at her for a long time without speaking as she gently approac

Chapter 40The door opened and Charlotte came through it like something had been chasing her.She hit Jensen’s chest with both arms, face buried in his shirt, and didn’t speak for a while. She Just held on. He let her, one hand on the back of her head, the other across her shoulders, standing in the doorway of her dorm room while she pressed her face into his chest and shook.When she finally pulled back her eyes were red and her mascara soiled her face and she looked at him with the expression he’d first seen on her face in the alley behind the hotel – the one where the mask was completely gone and what was underneath it was just a girl who’d been scared for a very long time.“Tell me what happened.” he said to her.She told him.The Godfather’s summons. Brian at the campus entrance. The brothel that looked ordinary from the street. The rooms she’d walked through to reach the man. The question he’d asked about Jensen, and the one he’d asked after – the marriage proposal wrapped in pl