The silence in the penthouse after Lily retreated to her room was a different kind of quiet. It was no longer just empty; it was charged, volatile. The fragile truce forged during the car ride had shattered the moment they crossed the threshold, leaving the familiar battlefield exposed.
Grady stood by the kitchen island, methodically cleaning a single glass. It was a pointless task, but the motion gave his hands something to do, a focus for the restless energy coiling inside him. The echo of Silas's threats and the ghost of Lily's worried gaze warred within his mind.
A door slammed down the hall. April emerged from her wing, having changed out of her designer daywear into equally expensive loungewear. Her silver hair was down now, a cascade of platinum that should have softened her features but instead only framed the sharpness in her eyes. She marched into the kitchen, her gaze sweeping over him with open contempt.
"You're brooding," she announced, as if diagnosing a disease. "It's tedious. Fill the silence with something useful or not at all."
Grady didn't look up from the glass. "I'm not brooding. I'm thinking. There's a difference."
"Thinking?" she scoffed, leaning against the opposite counter. "About what? New and exciting ways to be disappointingly inert? Or are you finally devising a strategy to fulfill your one, singular purpose in this arrangement?"
He finally set the glass down, the clink on the quartz countertop sounding like a gunshot in the tense space. He met her gaze, his pink eyes flat. "If you're referring to your father's breeding program, I suggest you take it up with him. I was clear about my terms. Survival. Not procreation."
"Your terms?" Her voice rose, sharp and venomous. "You have no terms! You have a life you didn't earn, in a home you don't deserve, protecting a wife you're clearly incapable of appreciating! You are a stray dog my father brought in from the rain, and all you do is track mud on the carpets and snarl at the hand that feeds you."
The words were meant to wound, and they did, but not in the way she intended. They didn't pierce his heart; they scraped against the iron walls of his resolve. He saw the strategy behind them—to provoke, to dominate, to make him feel small. It was a tactic he knew well from the streets.
"You confuse me with someone who cares about your opinion of me, April," he replied, his tone brutally even. "My job is to keep you alive. My duty is to my sister. My marriage to you is a transaction to ensure that duty is fulfilled. Your personal assessment of my worth is a variable I discarded a year ago."
She flinched as if struck. The raw honesty of his statement, the complete dismissal of her barbs, was more infuriating than any shouted insult. It stripped away the pretense and laid the ugly truth of their situation bare.
"How dare you," she seethed, pushing off the counter and taking a step toward him. "You think you're so superior, don't you? The noble street urchin, sacrificing for his sister. You look at me and you see a spoiled, shallow brat. You have no idea what it's like! The pressure, the expectations, being his daughter! This 'transaction,' as you so crudely put it, is my life too! And you… you just stand there, a block of unfeeling stone, refusing to even try to—"
"To what?" Grady interrupted, his own patience, worn thin by the day's events, finally beginning to fray. A flicker of something dangerous sparked in his eyes. "To play happy families? To pretend this is anything other than what it is? You think a few pleasantries over dinner will change the fact that your father shot me and threatened to murder a child to get what he wanted? You live in this gilded world, April, but you helped build the cage. Don't blame me for refusing to admire the decorations."
Her face went pale, then flushed a deep, furious red. The truth was a weapon he rarely used, but when he did, it was devastating.
"You arrogant, self-righteous—" she sputtered, searching for a word vile enough.
"Pragmatist," he finished for her, turning his back on her to look out the window at the darkening city. The dismissal was absolute. "I'm going to run a perimeter check. Do try not to stab me in my sleep. It would create paperwork for your father's people, and we both know how he dislikes inefficiency."
He walked away, leaving her standing alone in the vast, silent kitchen, trembling with a rage so profound it felt like a physical force. She wanted to scream, to throw something, to shatter the infuriating calm that surrounded him like a forcefield.
But he was gone. The argument was over, and he had won by simply refusing to play her game. He had reduced their tumultuous, painful reality to cold, hard logic, and in doing so, had exposed the raw, helpless frustration that festered beneath her own venom.
She was alone. Trapped with a man who saw her not as a person, but as a component of his prison sentence. And for the first time, the heat of her anger was edged with the cold, chilling fear that he might be right.