LUCAS POV
"My eyes widened in shock as my own daughter pinned my throat to the wall."
The words echoed in my mind, foreign and humiliating, refusing to settle into something I could dismiss. For a moment, one sharp and disorienting moment, I did not react.
Her fingers were tight around my throat, small yet unyielding, pressing me back against the cold stone as though I were nothing more than an ordinary man, not the one who had broken kingdoms and commanded fear without question.
My daughter.
The realization struck harder than her grip ever could, because there was nothing wild in the way she held me, no panic, no clumsy desperation. There was power, controlled and deliberate, and that was what made it dangerous.
The room fell into a suffocating stillness, as though even the air itself hesitated, waiting for me to act, to remind her of who I was, of what I could do.
Yet I did nothing.
