Chapter One Hundred And Eighty
The silence in the grand dining hall was absolute as the patriarch stepped fully into the room. The heavy, rhythmic sound of his cane against the polished white marble ceased. For a long, freezing moment, his pitch-black eyes swept across the vast space, moving past the bowing staff members, passing over me in my heavy black silk abaya, and locking entirely onto Chase. The hard, unyielding lines of his weathered face seemed to shift, the cold stone cracking to reveal an emotion that I never expected to see on the face of the man who had dismantled our lives from the shadows.
He moved forward. He did not walk with the weakness of an old, sick man, despite what the rumors in the corporate files had suggested. His stride was slow, deliberate, and carried an i
