The world held its breath.
The dust settled, revealing a tableau of impossible, beautiful, and deeply, profoundly inconvenient tension.
Chloe, my beautiful, fanatical shadow, stood between Isabelle and the Sword King, her twin daggers a cross-block against his legendary katana.
A thin trickle of blood, dark and shockingly vibrant, ran from the corner of her mouth. She had taken the full force of his A-Rank strike, and she was still standing.
Barely.
"She will not fight you," Chloe repeated, her voice a blade of ice, her amethyst eyes burning with a cold, possessive fire. "But I will. No one touches what belongs to my Lord."
The implication was clear. Isabelle was property. His property. And Chloe was the guard dog.
The air, which had been thick with the tension of a family reunion gone horribly wrong, now crackled with the raw, chaotic energy of a psychosexual standoff.
