The Ebon Harbor yacht bobbed on the marina like a tipsy heiress who'd had one too many flutes of champagne, its decks positively swarming with guests. Business moguls from every corner of the country had descended upon it, lured by the promise of an evening hosted by the reclusive CEO of Throne Enterprise.
Ostensibly, this gala was meant to stretch his business connections across the nation—after all, his Randora-based empire dealt in cutting-edge technology, high-grade equipment, and especially advanced weaponry suited for government defense, private protection, or whatever kept the paranoid ultra-rich sleeping soundly. His grand plan? Swallow Velmora whole and become the biggest name in the country.
Everyone had understood the assignment: dress to obliterate. Politicians, senators, and even Miss Manuel, the senator and a celebrity who needed no introduction and got one anyway, had turned up to glisten and network. The night was barely an infant—fussy, loud, and already showing signs of being utterly unmanageable.
But if anyone was being honest, business was not the true magnet drawing this crowd. Nobody—not a single soul outside of Peter, the Managing Director—had ever laid eyes on Mr. Throne.
In fact, a solid chunk of Throne Enterprise employees operated under the blissful assumption that Peter was the boss, seeing as he handled every essential detail, every deal, every crisis.
So, while glasses clicked in dutiful toast, the real music came from gossip and speculation, steadily drowning out the string quartet. Reporters, radio personalities, TV crews, photographers, and paparazzi all hovered at the edges like well-dressed vultures, waiting for something—anything—to happen.
"This entire time, I legitimately thought Peter was the big bad wolf of Throne Enterprises," murmured a young mogul with silver hair and a gold suit that caught every single light in the room, practically turning him into a walking chandelier. He punctuated the revelation with a slow sip of Scotch.
"But why no Crestfall?" another asked, squinting as if the mystery offended him personally.
"I don't care about the setting," the silver-haired man said with a smirk. "I'm here for celebrities and dangerously beautiful women."
"I heard this yacht belongs to him," a third mogul chimed in, gesturing at the polished teak deck beneath their feet.
"Absolutely not," the silver fox retorted. "There is no way he's sitting on more money than Adrian Stark."
"Adrian is king in Crestfall," the second man clarified, ticking an imaginary box with his finger. "This guy is king everywhere except Crestfall."
Thus began the tenth minute of their Very Important Debate over who was richer, a competition neither billionaire knew they were entered in.
Then the silver-haired man spotted her.
She was sandwiched between a small crowd of admirers, and he could only see her back—but what a back it was!
Ethereal didn't even begin to cover it. The gown was a deep, saturated crimson, covered in fine crystal detailing that caught every flicker of light and threw it right back like a dare.
Completely backless—a clean, elegant plunge down the spine—it highlighted the smooth line of her back and the almost arrogant confidence in her posture.
The fabric sculpted her waist and hips before spilling into a sleek, flowing train, while a high slit along one leg added just enough danger to the elegance.
Her hair was twisted into an artfully messy bun, loose strands framing her face and neck with a deliberate, controlled chaos. Watching her move, he decided she was absolutely worth abandoning a pointless conversation for.
"Gentlemen," he announced, a grin stretching to his ears, "I've just found my future wife. She simply doesn't know it yet."
He didn't wait for a reply. He crossed the deck, and the sea of guests parted around him like the Red Sea, a miraculous and slightly dramatic exit.
The lady in question laughed at something one of her companions said, moving with the full awareness that she was currently holding court.
She reveled in the attention—from men, from women, from anyone with the good sense to appreciate a woman who understood the assignment better than the whole guest list combined. She allowed herself a brief, delicious moment to wonder just how much more attention would arrive when the event hit its peak.
A handful of celebrities hadn't even arrived yet, but she knew the roster. She knew she was, at this very moment, the best-dressed creature on board.
"Excuse me," the silver-haired man said smoothly, inserting himself into the circle.
One of the ladies gasped. "Oh, it's Mr. Smith!"
The woman turned, and the full wattage of Tiffany Jackson's smile greeted him. It was wide, knowing, and quietly lethal.
"Miss Jackson…" Mr. Smith breathed, taking her hand and placing a kiss just behind her knuckles with precision and care. "Good lord, how did I manage to forget how utterly graceful you are?"
"I really should see you more often, Mr. Smith," Tiffany replied, her smile polite but her eyes already wandering toward the entrance.
A fresh ripple of commotion stirred there, whispers slithering through the crowd.
Mr. Stark has arrived.
"You're still with Adrian?" Mr. Smith asked, his tone bordering on mournful.
"Yes, we're still together," Tiffany said, already taking a step. "Just making sure they've arrived."
She glided toward the entrance, leaving Mr. Smith to nurse the ancient, bitter hatred he reserved exclusively for Adrian Stark—the man who always, always pulled the most beautiful women out from under him.
A voice rang from the entrance, bright and entirely too pleased with itself. "Oh, it's the handsome one, people!"
Cassian Stark stepped into the room, and for ten solid seconds, half the yacht mistook him for Adrian.
An easy mistake, really, when you carried the Stark jawline and wore a tuxedo that practically whispered "upscale."
He was a symphony of sharp tailoring and accidental allure, the kind of man who couldn't not stop a show even if he tried.
Girls giggled; a few pressed hands to their chests. Some gazes softened with the warm syrup of sympathy, remembering the accident that had nearly taken him off the board for good. Cassian drank it all in like oxygen, a showstopper who'd dressed to kill and had absolutely no intention of committing a fashion felony tonight.
***
While the yacht hummed with giggles, whispers, and the foot-tapping impatience of reporters poised for the real moguls of the evening, the Stark household was still a hurricane of half-done hair, sharp words, and secrets stuffed beneath pillows.
"What do you mean, Adrian's already left? How? And why on earth early?" Maria's voice cut down the staircase like a blade. She stood clutching the banister, rollers still gripping her hair like tiny medieval torture devices, glaring at Paul, Adrian's house servant.
"He's making a detour, ma'am," Paul replied, his tone professionally neutral—the kind of voice servants perfected when delivering news that might get them beheaded in a different century.
Maria pursed her lips so tightly they nearly disappeared. From her vantage point on the stairs, she spotted Christine at the mansion's entrance, accepting a slim envelope from a courier. Christine's fingers closed around it with the reverence of a woman accepting classified documents, which, in this house, it might as well have been.
The past few weeks had rattled every branch of the Stark family tree. Strange, unsettling occurrences—the men had started asking the same uncomfortable question: had they performed the ceremony correctly?
Missing a single precaution in a family like theirs wasn't a clerical error; it was an invitation to disaster. And despite DNA results proving Bonita was undeniably Stark blood, a nagging sense of something overlooked clawed at Saint's thoughts.
Worse still was Christine. The old woman had been busier than a cat in a fish market, and Maria didn't know exactly what she was up to, only that it made her profoundly anxious—the kind that prickled at the back of her neck and whispered, she's going to find something.
"What was the mail about?" Maria asked, the moment Christine's foot touched the top stair.
Christine paused, letting a slow, deliberate frown settle over her features. "What are we, Maria? Friends? It's none of your business."
She swept past before Maria could fire back, the slam of her bedroom door serving as punctuation.
Maria rolled her eyes hard enough to endanger her optic nerves. Before she could stew further, the front entrance swung open and Bonita burst through like a woman who had places to be and zero patience for maternal interrogation.
"Where have you been, Boni? I need to discuss something with you," Maria said, shifting into concerned-mother mode with the ease of a politician swapping talking points.
"I said no to my shares! Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a gala to attend," Bonita replied, not breaking stride as she ascended the stairs.
Maria frowned, her posture stiffening. "You're not going to the gala. Who will be watching Saint?"
Bonita stopped mid-step and turned, letting out a laugh so dry it could have started a fire. "Oh, you're serious? What happened to his nurse, Mother? Did she evaporate?"
Maria sighed, scratching the bridge of her nose—a tell she'd never managed to shake. Truth was, she didn't want Bonita anywhere near that yacht. The Doctor would be there, and that made things dangerously unpredictable.
"You're not a business mogul, a celebrity, or anything of the sort. You're just an internet sensation," Maria argued, her tone tilting toward dismissive.
Bonita's smile was edged with triumph. "That's what they call an influencer, and I'm going. Besides, Mr. Throne invited me himself."
Maria's eyes widened, the greed flickering to life before she could smother it. "What? You spoke to him?"
Bonita hated that look—the sudden, hungry interest—and she hated even more how familiar it was. "I'm doing this for my part in the company. Only mine," she declared, and continued upward before her mother could draw another breath.
Privately, Bonita had unearthed far more than an invitation lately. Hacking into Sterling's systems had revealed that Maria's affair with Kefas stretched back further than she'd imagined—right back to when David was still very much home. She still hadn't found a whisper of evidence about her father's fate, but she'd vowed to keep digging, especially after discovering something unnerving; Maria sometimes walked into her own bedroom and simply vanished. The only rational explanation was a hidden room. And Bonita intended to find it.
She reached her room, flicked open her laptop, and ordered a gown and heels with the kind of casual efficiency reserved for people who knew the word impossible didn't apply to the Stark name. Then she stepped into a steaming bath, letting the water wash away the first layer of a very long night.
A few doors down, Christine tore open the envelope and slid out the contents: a home DNA testing kit.
She allowed herself a thin, triumphant smirk. She was here to dig deeper into her son's disappearance, to investigate Maria and unearth the secrets the woman had been burying for years. Saint had mentioned something odd recently—the mantle with Bonita felt a little lighter than it should have. And that, as Christine's instincts howled, was highly suspicious.
"You're not really going to test Bonita with that."
Christine startled so violently she nearly flung the kit across the room. Maria stood in the doorway, having entered with the silence of a snake, her face now draped in something dark and unnervingly calm.
"Why can't I?" Christine asked, steadying her voice.
"Because I said so." Maria's words were soft, almost pleasant, which only made them more threatening. She extended her hand, palm up. "Give it to me, Christ."
Christine's heart hammered, but she lifted her chin. "What are you hiding, Maria? Did you kill David?"
Maria's expression flickered—just for a heartbeat—before settling back into dangerous stillness. "What are you—"
"Grandma, can I borrow your car? Mine got a little lumpy on the way from the airport."
Bonita breezed in, comb gliding through her damp hair, entirely oblivious to the invisible knives still vibrating in the air.
Instantaneously, Christine shoved the DNA kit under her pillow and sat on it, her expression rearranging itself into grandmotherly serenity.
"It's fine, darling. I'll take the driver's car," Christine said, a little too quickly.
"Thanks, Grandma." Bonita paused at the threshold and turned back, her gaze landing on Maria with a cool, unblinking precision. "Oh, and Mom? I've got my eyes on you."
She didn't linger to watch the impact.
Bonita knew full well that seconds before she'd walked in, Maria had been on the verge of threatening Christine. So she'd dropped that unfiltered little grenade on purpose—just to keep her mother balanced on the edge, right where liars belonged. The woman was slipping, and Bonita was determined to be there when she hit the ground.
Maria's face contorted as she followed her daughter into the hallway. "What do you mean by that?!" she almost yelled.
Behind her, Christine's door slammed shut with the finality of a vault locking, muffling whatever storm was about to break.