Chapter 2 - Harrison Blackwood
“Harrison Blackwood.”
His voice came instantly, sharp as cut crystal and older than most men’s loyalty. “Madam Chairwoman.”
For seven years, only a handful of people had used that title around you. Fewer still had understood the cost of your refusal to wear it publicly. Harrison was one of the oldest among them—your late father’s chief legal strategist, then family office director, and now the quiet blade behind Vaughn Dominion’s board structure.
“Are you ready for tonight’s gala?” he asked.
You looked at the last glowing scrap of blue fabric collapsing into cinders.
“Yes,” you said. “Send everyone.”
He did not ask why. Men like Harrison knew that timing itself was information.
“Forty minutes,” he said. “And Clara?”
“Yes?”
“Make it memorable.”
May you like
You ended the call and went back inside the house you had spent seven years pretending was enough.
Not because it had ever truly been enough, but because you had wanted so desperately to believe that love unobserved by money could still survive if you starved the right parts of yourself. When you married Adrian, you did it without disclosing who you were because you were tired of being approached like an asset, a surname, a pathway, a legacy. You wanted one thing in your life that would come to you clean. One man who would choose you before the title, before the holdings, before the tower of quiet wealth your father had built from steel, logistics, and merciless intelligence.
