The drive felt endless.
Eloise didn't know how long they'd been on the road—twenty minutes, an hour, a lifetime—but her sense of time had dissolved somewhere between the panic and the suffocating silence inside the SUV. The men never spoke. Not to her. Not to one another. Their presence was oppressive, disciplined, military.
When the car finally slowed, her breath caught.
Eloise had never seen a mansion like this.
Even in magazines, even in movies, even in the whole meticulously curated charade of William's inherited world—nothing touched the silent, breathtaking intimidation of the estate the men marched her into. This was wealth that didn't advertise; it simply was. The very air seemed to possess a different molecular structure.
