My husband brought his pregnant mistress into our home and announced, “She’s giving me the child you never could.” My mother-in-law screamed, “You useless woman! You can’t even give my son a baby!” Then she dumped a boiling bowl of food over my head while they laughed. I stood there silently, hiding a smile. They had no idea why I’d never gotten pregnant—or what the DNA test and the lawyer waiting outside were about to reveal...

Claire’s fingers tightened around the edge of the marble island.

“The Obsidian Group?” she whispered, the cold air in the room suddenly feeling suffocating. “Why would they target Ethan? Ethan was a nobody. His company barely registered on their radar.”

“Ethan wasn't the target, Claire,” a deep, commanding voice spoke from the double doors of the penthouse.

Alexander Vance stepped into the room, his long cashmere coat still damp from the autumn rain outside. His jaw was set like carved granite, his eyes burning with a dark, dangerous fire.

He walked up to Claire and placed a heavy, weathered wooden box on the table between them. Carved into the top of the wood was an anchor snapped in half by a coiled serpent—the infamous sigil of the Vance family’s oldest and most ruthless enemy.

“Alexander... what is this?” Claire asked, her voice barely above a breath.

“Arthur’s team intercepted this at the international shipping docks an hour ago,” Alexander said, unlatching the brass hinges of the box. “Ethan was never the architect of your misery, Claire. He was merely an expendable pawn. Someone knew you had taken refuge under the Mercer name. Someone knew where you were hiding. They planted Brenda and fed Ethan’s greed deliberately, pushing him to abuse you, to break you, to force you out into the open.”

Alexander lifted the lid of the box.

Inside, resting on a bed of black velvet, was a silver pocket watch. It was dented, its crystal face cracked down the center, the hands frozen precisely at 3:17—the exact time her father’s private jet had vanished from radar over the Atlantic six years ago.

Underneath the watch was a fresh, handwritten note on heavy parchment:

*‘Welcome back to the board, Little Vance. Your husband was merely the opening move. Now, let us see if you can protect your brother’s empire... or burn with it.’*

Claire looked down at her father’s watch, her trembling hand reaching out to touch the cold, cracked glass.

Ethan and Margaret had been nothing more than vicious insects manipulated by a phantom lurking in the shadows. The domestic war she had just fought was merely the prologue to an ancient blood feud that had cost her parents their lives—and was now coming directly for her.

Claire looked up, meeting Alexander’s fierce, unyielding gaze. The sweet, fragile woman who had suffered in silence was dead and buried.

In her place stood an empress ready for war.

“Arthur,” Claire said, her voice dropping into a register of sheer, merciless authority. “Cancel my appointments for tomorrow. Mobilize our private security fleet in the Atlantic.”