For three years, I slept with my father’s head of security behind everyone’s back.

Last night, with one hand at my throat and the other under my dress, he finally asked for a name, a future, something real.

“After graduation,” I whispered against his mouth. “Let me finish my defense first. Then we’ll tell them.”

“No.”

By then I was shaking beneath him on the leather seat. “Then sooner. On my birthday next Friday. I’ll stop hiding then... Cassian, please—gentler...”

That seemed to satisfy him. His mouth softened against my skin, and his voice dropped low against my ear.

“Good girl. I just want you too much.”

The next afternoon, I met my best friend for tea.

The moment she opened the passenger door, she spotted the torn foil packet caught beside the seat and lifted a brow.

“Bourbon cherry?” she said, already grinning. “That’s our company’s unreleased line. So this is what you’ve been hiding.”

I snatched it up and shoved it into my bag. “It’s not public yet.”

She frowned. “That’s the strange part. We only sent those samples to a handful of VIP clients.” Then she pulled out her phone. “I did a product follow-up with one of them yesterday, and his private account was basically a shrine to his girlfriend.”

She turned the screen toward me.

I only looked once, and my whole body went cold.

The man in the photo had a line of Latin script inked low across his abdomen.

I knew that tattoo.

I had kissed it the night before.

My fingers started shaking as I opened the private account Cassian had never shown me.

April 4. The conservatory. Me and him.

April 7. The upstairs studio. Me and him again.

April 11—last night. A six-second clip in the back of the car.

I left my best friend at the tea room and drove straight to the address she had given me.

Ravencrest House, No. 18.

All the way there, I told myself it could still be a mistake. A private account meant nothing. A tattoo meant nothing. A six-second clip could mean anything.

I stopped believing that the moment I reached the gates.

Music drifted across the lawn. Light spilled over the pool. Men in linen and women in silk moved through the garden with the lazy ease of people who had never been denied anything.

I found Cassian almost at once.

He was stretched back in a chair with a cigarette between his fingers, laughing with the men around him. He looked like he belonged there—like he had always belonged there.

One of them raised his glass.

“If you really want to destroy Evelyn Vale, there are easier ways. Lean on the board. Freeze the grant money. Women like her care about reputation more than anything.”

A few of them laughed.

Another man said, “Still—are you sure she was the one behind what happened to your sister? It doesn’t sound like her.”

Cassian’s expression changed, only slightly.

“She sat on the review committee,” he said. “My sister went in with original work and came out publicly branded a fraud. You think that happened by accident?”

“She signed off on the decision,” another man said, more carefully. “That’s not the same as engineering the whole thing.”

Cassian didn’t answer right away.

For the briefest second, I thought he might actually consider that.

Then he took a drag from his cigarette and said, “My sister was good enough for every honor in that place until the room decided she came from the wrong family. Evelyn Vale looked down on us before she ever opened the file. That was enough.”

No one said anything after that.

Another man leaned forward with a grin. “So you’re really going through with it? After three years? Don’t tell me you’ve gone soft.”

Cassian smiled.

“Soft?” he said. “If Evelyn Vale knew how far this has already gone with her daughter, she’d stop pretending blood and breeding still put her above people like us. She’d call marriage the cleanest way out.”

That got another round of laughter.

“And tonight?” someone asked. “At the award ceremony?”

Cassian flicked ash into the tray beside him.

“I made sure she won’t forget it.”

I didn’t stay to hear the rest.

By the time I got back to the car, my hands were shaking so badly I dropped the keys twice. I drove straight to St. Aurelius Institute.

My mother had spent her whole life building a name people respected. She could survive criticism. She could survive malice. But public humiliation—especially this kind, tied to me—was different.

The ceremony had already started by the time I arrived.

The auditorium was full—trustees, faculty, donors, alumni. My mother stood at the podium in ivory silk, poised beneath the stage lights as the institute prepared to present her with its highest academic honor.

“Mom—”

She looked up, saw me near the aisle, and smiled.

“My daughter just arrived,” she said. “Aria, come here.”

I should have stayed where I was.

Instead, I walked toward the stage.

She touched my arm lightly and said, “She’s finishing her graduate work this spring. I hope you’ll all be kind to her.”

Then the screen behind us flickered.

At first, I thought it was a technical fault.

Then the first video appeared.

A backseat. A man’s hand. My body. My voice, altered but still mine. Then another clip. The conservatory. Another. The upstairs studio. Another. The car again.

Not random footage.

Chosen footage.

Edited just enough to make it cruel.

My face had been blurred in every frame—softened, obscured, covered just enough that strangers could pretend not to know for certain.

My mother did not need certainty.

She only looked at the screen once.

For a second, the room went silent.

Then came the noise—gasps, whispers, chairs scraping, phones coming out.

I couldn’t move.

My mother turned from the screen to me.

She knew.

Not because the videos were clear. They weren’t.

Because she was my mother.

Her lips parted. One hand lifted, trembling.

“Mom—”

She swayed.

The microphone hit the floor with a burst of feedback. People surged toward the stage. Someone shouted for a doctor. Someone else yelled to cut the screen.

I caught her just as she collapsed.

“Mom!”

The hospital room was painfully white.

My mother had only just opened her eyes when she turned toward me and asked, in a voice so weak I had to lean closer to hear it,

“Who is he?”

I lowered my gaze and bit the inside of my lip.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I let you down.”

She watched me for a long moment, then closed her eyes again. When she spoke, her voice was steadier, but only just.

“If you don’t want to tell me, I won’t force you. But you will not attend the graduation ceremony. Finish your defense next week, and after that, you leave. I want you abroad before anyone has time to say your name again.”

I nodded. “Alright.”

That should have been the end of it, but standing there beside her bed, I kept seeing him anyway.

The first time I met Cassian, I was nineteen and standing in the rain outside the institute, trying not to panic.

My mother had sent me to deliver an original manuscript to a private trustees’ dinner that night, and I had left the document tube across the city in the restoration studio. Traffic was frozen, the driver was nowhere near me, and I could already imagine my mother’s face when I failed to arrive with it.

A motorcycle pulled up at the curb.

The rider lifted his visor, looked at me once, and asked, “Where?”

I told him.

He said, “Get on.”

I did.

We cut through traffic, crossed half the city in minutes, and made it back before the dinner began. By the time I stepped off the bike, clutching the recovered manuscript to my chest, I was too shaken to ask his name.

The second time I saw him, he was standing in the front hall of our house, newly brought onto my father’s private security detail. Within months, he had become the man my father trusted most.

I noticed him immediately.

After that, he seemed to be everywhere.

He took me places my life had never made room for. Rooftops after midnight. Empty roads outside the city. Private clubs I would never have entered on my own. With him, everything felt louder, faster, less controlled. I mistook that feeling for freedom.

Now I knew better.

What had looked like recklessness was patience. What had felt like love was revenge.

My phone vibrated in my hand.

Cassian.

I stared at the name before opening the message.

Aria, someone got hold of private footage and played it at the event. I’m going to find out who did it. I’m worried about you. Where are you? I’m coming to get you.

The words were perfect. Concerned. Urgent. Protective.

If I hadn’t heard him at Ravencrest House, I might have believed every one of them.

Instead, I locked my phone and left the room.

I went straight back to the lab.

I stayed there until security turned off half the floor lights. I recalibrated instruments, reran data, corrected graphs, revised the last pages of my dissertation—anything that kept my hands moving. I didn’t turn my phone back on.

Two days later, I walked into my defense and saw a face I didn’t recognize at the far end of the review table.

One of the others leaned toward me and whispered, almost cheerfully, “That’s Linnea Shaw. She did all three degrees here. You’re lucky—she has a reputation for being fair.”

Lucky.

I gave my presentation, answered the first round of questions, and for a few minutes I thought I might get through it cleanly. Most of the panel looked satisfied. One of them was already writing notes that looked like approval.

Then Linnea looked up from my dissertation and said, “I think this work may be plagiarized.”

The room went still.

I opened my folder at once and pushed forward my materials. “It isn’t. I brought the raw files, the timestamps, and the full testing videos.”

She barely glanced at them.

“None of that proves the work is original,” she said. “Data can be cleaned. Footage can be staged.”

A few people on the panel shifted in their seats. One reached for the printouts. Another frowned and looked back at me. I felt the mood change before anyone else spoke.

Then Linnea leaned back and added, almost lightly, “Three years ago, Professor Vale had no difficulty deciding someone else’s work was fraudulent. I don’t see why scrutiny should offend you now.”

My hands went cold.

There it was.

Not a concern about the work. Not a scholarly challenge. A grudge.

I heard myself say, “My dissertation is original. I can prove that.”

“Then prove it,” she said.

Something turned sharply in my stomach. I barely managed an apology before leaving the room.

I made it to the washroom on instinct, caught the edge of the sink with both hands, and gagged hard enough to bring tears to my eyes.

Water was running somewhere behind me. A stall door opened.

Linnea gave my shoulder a light pat, her smile polite and false.

“Then prove it,” she said. “And do try not to be so sensitive.”

She left me at the sink.

By the time I came out, one of the others from my group had already heard what happened.

“Linnea studied under your mother,” she whispered. “She was also close to Cassian Hale’s sister.”

I stopped walking.

So that was it.

When I reached the front gate, I saw him at once.

Cassian stood under the stone arch, half-turned toward a woman in a pale coat. She leaned in to say something, and he lifted a hand to smooth her hair back from her face.

Linnea.

For a second, I couldn’t move.

Then I turned and walked the other way.

I cut through the west path and into the arboretum, but I didn’t get far. Two men stepped out from between the trees, both smelling of liquor.

One of them looked me over and laughed. “So it’s really her.”

The other said, “Didn’t know the quiet ones sounded like that.”

My hand moved before I thought. The slap cracked across his face.

“Move.”

He shoved me hard. My back hit the tree behind me, and pain shot through my shoulder. The other one grabbed my wrist and pulled.

I screamed.

The first man reached for me again.

He never got the chance.

Something slammed into him from the side, and he went down hard. By the time I looked up, Cassian was already there. The second man took one look at his face and ran. His friend staggered up a second later and followed.

Cassian turned to me at once.

“Aria. Are you hurt?”

He caught my arm, checking too quickly, too closely. I shoved him off and folded my arms over myself.

He froze.

“Why haven’t you answered a single call?” he asked. “Those videos—someone stole private footage and leaked it. I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know.”

He sounded almost angry, almost hurt.

If I hadn’t heard him the night before, I might have believed him.

“I’ll come with you,” he said. “I’ll explain everything to your parents. We don’t have to hide anymore.”

Then he said it.

“Marry me.”

My chest tightened.

After three years in secret. After the videos. After my mother collapsed in front of half the city.

He stepped closer.

“I mean it. I’ll make this right. I’ll protect you. I’ll protect your family.”

A week ago, I would have broken down and said yes.

Now all I could think was that if I turned on him too soon, he might do something worse.

I didn’t answer. He took my silence for hesitation and pulled me into him.

I went rigid.

His mouth found my neck. Once, that would have undone me. Now it only made my skin crawl.

“Aria,” he murmured. “Forgive me.”

“Let go.”

He didn’t.

I bit down hard on his shoulder. He sucked in a breath, then only held me tighter, like he thought this was a quarrel he could kiss his way through.

“Fine,” he said against my skin. “If that helps, do it again.”

Then he kissed me.

I turned my face away, but his hand caught my jaw and held it there. Not rough. Not angry. Worse than that—familiar. Practiced.

My stomach lurched.

All I could think was:

Had he set up another camera?