Grace Laurent was always watched.Long before the cameras, before the runways and the rooftop parties, there had been eyes that were curious, cold, calculating. Some watched because they wanted her. Others, because they feared her. But no one ever looked closely enough to see what mattered.
They saw perfection. She built it that way.
From the outside, her life looked like silk: an heiress to one of Ashford's oldest fashion legacies, born into privilege so seamless that it was hard to tell where her name ended and power began. Her mother had been a model, all ice and elegance, her smile so sharp it left bruises. Her father had died when Grace was eleven. Car crash, they said. Instant. Clean.
Grace remembered the blood on the hood of the car like it had stained her skin.
People whispered about recklessness, inheritance, maybe even blame, but the Laurents were too rich to be questioned out loud. The story was closed like a clasped necklace. Silent. Suffocating.
That was the first time Grace learned how grief could look like a performance.And how stillness could make someone dangerous.
By twelve, she had stopped crying. By fifteen, she had stopped trusting. By eighteen, she had learned that in a world of predators, the only way to survive was to become the most beautiful threat in the room.
Her mother didn't notice the shift. Or maybe she did and approved of it. There had always been an understanding between them — the kind passed down through generations of women who smiled for cameras and slit throats in silence.
"You don't need to be loved," her mother once told her. "You need to be wanted. That is what gives a woman power."
So Grace became wantable. Desirable. Soft in the right places, sharp in the ones that mattered.
She had the face of a high priestess and the body of a siren. Skin like porcelain under moonlight, lips naturally tinted like old wine, and eyes, unmistakably grey, that looked straight through people. Her hair fell in waves to her waist, black as ink and always immaculate, like a curtain drawn over the parts of her she never revealed.
Now, at twenty-six, she walked through Riverton like a secret the city was aching to tell. She owned Laurent Models, the country's most elite agency. She handpicked girls like dolls, trained them not in poses but in performance, including how to sit, how to lean in, how to speak softly, and lie like it was breathing.
Her office was a penthouse draped in wine velvet and dim lighting, the kind of place men stepped into and forgot how to hold eye contact. She always wore muted colors like champagne, bone, storm grey, all the tones that whispered luxury without asking for attention.
She never needed to ask.
Grace had admirers, of course.Men with money, fame, and foreign accents. They circled her like moths, drawn in by the illusion, by the curve of her lips, the velvet hush of her voice, the way she made silence feel intimate. She let them orbit, fed them crumbs of attention, but never enough to matter.
They sent her flowers she never smelled, gifts she never opened, love letters that were tossed into drawers like old receipts. None of them touched her. Not really.
Because Grace Laurent did not belong to anyone.
And perhaps that was the quiet, dangerous truth: she never had.
Some said she was cold. Others called her untouchable. But those closest to her, the assistants, the stylists, the girls she trained, understood that Grace was not disinterested. She was already full. As if her heart was occupied by something long before they ever arrived.
She never spoke of it.
But sometimes, her gaze lingered on magazine covers longer than necessary. Sometimes, she watched a film in total silence, her body still, her lips parted just slightly. And sometimes, on nights when the city was too loud, she sat on her balcony with a glass of wine she never drank, staring into the skyline like it owed her something.
She never dated.Never needed to.Her desire had already been spoken for — long ago, and never revoked.
She closed the folder in front of her, a portfolio of a new model. Blonde. Eager. Disposable. Her assistant hovered in the doorway, asking something about a launch event next week. Grace nodded without listening. Her eyes were on the skyline.
He was in this city. She could feel it.Just as he would feel her, soon enough.
She applied a deep red lipstick before leaving her office. In the mirror, her reflection smiled back at her. Beautiful. Controlled. Dangerous.
A honey trap in heels.
And somewhere beneath the silk and smiles, the girl she used to be, slept lightly, breathing in love. Or was it obsession?