The drive back to the airport felt longer than the entire night that had come before it. Darius kept both hands steady on the wheel, though every part of him ached to reach across the console and take Rhea's hand, to say something, anything, that would erase the look that had settled on her face the moment she pulled away from him in that basement. He stole a quick glance at her, his jaw tightening as a sharp flare of pain radiated across his swollen face. «I actually do not work for those people I work for, I am an Argent, but I have to keep the identity hidden.» The words burned on the tip of his tongue, but he forced himself to swallow them back down. Revealing his true identity to her would only place a massive target on her back. Instead, he had to stick to the cover story he had manufactured—that he worked as a high-level distributor for a powerful mafia syndicate, using their resources to settle his scores. More convenient. But Rhea

With Mars Bentley finally behind bars, and the shadow of his threats lifted for good, even though Cameron Bentley wouldn't stop until he got his son out, even thought that would be very difficult, Darius allowed himself, to breathe properly without having to think of what plot someone is orchestrating to bring him down next. But the relief was hollow. Every time he exhaled, it caught somewhere in his chest, tangled with the memory of Rhea's face the night everything fell apart. The disgust in her eyes and the silence that followed him all the way home, which still wrapped around him till today. He sat sprawled across the couch, staring blankly at his phone, thumb hovering uselessly over her contact photo. "You've been staring at that screen for twenty minutes," Charlie said, dropping into the armchair across from him with a bag of chips. "You gonna call her, or are we just gonna admire her contact picture together?" Darius exhaled sharply, tossin

"This drug." Darius dropped the page onto the bedside table, hard enough that the monitor beside it rattled. "The one added 2 years ago. Why was it introduced." Whitfield exchanged a glance with his colleagues before answering, his tone careful, rehearsed in the way of someone who had explained this before. "That was recommended by Dr. Kane, one of the most respected clinical pharmacists in the region. He consulted on your grandmaster's case after the fatigue and tremors became more pronounced. The medication was meant to stabilize his energy levels and reduce strain on the heart during periods of exertion." "And it's been effective," the second physician added, quicker than Darius expected, almost eager to reassure him. "Mr. Argent's own reports supported it. He told us himself, more than once, that he felt sharper, steadier. He specifically asked that we continue it when we raised the possibility of adjusting the dosage last spring." "He appreciated the change," Whitfield said.

The lab's confession still rang in Darius's ears long after he'd hung up the phone, but for once, being one step ahead had worked in his favor. "Thank God for paranoia," Charlie said, watching Darius pull a small sealed vial from the back of the medicine cabinet, tucked behind a row of ordinary supplements where no one would think to look twice. "You really made a duplicate of everything?" "You think I'd just blindly trust what's going on in this city," Darius confirmed, turning the vial over in his fingers, studying the label he'd written himself in a hand no one else would recognize. "I wasn't about to hand over the only copy of evidence to a courier I'd never met, going to a lab I barely visit, based on a referral I couldn't verify. Call it instinct." "Call it terrifying," Charlie muttered. "So what now? How are you going to get these samples tested." "I have a plan." Darius was already pulling up flight logistics on his laptop, jaw set with the particula

The morning after the briefing with Natasha, the air inside the suite carried a sharp, metallic chill that no amount of central heating could chase away. Seven days had passed since his confrontation with Valerio, and despite his best efforts to erase the man from his mind, the audacity of Valerio’s presence on campus hung over him like a persistent fog. In just one short week, Valerio had transformed his floor into a perpetual playground for the school’s trust-fund elite and Darius tried as much as possible to ignore him, both on campus and the hallway. Night after night, bass from his sound system rattled the glass of the quiet wing, accompanied by the endless stream of female students ducking in and out of his suite. Valerio’s flawless features and effortless charm had quickly earned him an almost legendary status among the Greywick student body. To them, he was an untouchable mini-god. Darius smoothed the lapels of his jacket, grabbing his le