Marquis Farnese's hands clenched behind his back as he strode through the marble halls of his manor, the echoes of laughter from the marketplace still burning like fire in his ears. The humiliation of being made a fool before the eyes of merchants, peasants, and nobility alike gnawed at him more fiercely than any wound could.
His pride, his most treasured possession, had been trampled by a single sorceress with nothing more than her words and her presence. The sting of it did not weaken him. It hardened him.
If anything, that humiliation only deepened his hunger. He no longer merely desired to conquer Sienna-Rose; now he wished to bend her to his will, to drag her from the lofty pedestal where she stood untouchable, and to make her kneel before him.
And Claire, sweet, delicate Claire—he wanted her even more desperately, as if taking her would prove to the world, and to himself, that nothing and no one could defy Marquis Farnese.
