The silence that followed was so thick that it felt as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of the chamber.
Mara sat perfectly still, not looking one bit surprised.
She had known this since her wedding night, when the man sitting beside her whispered it in her ear: My father has been impotent for ten years. He had said it with a gun to her head, and she had built her entire survival on that exact fact.
What terrified her wasn't the truth on that page.
It was that Bruno had gotten his hands on the proof… a private, decade-old file from a Swiss clinic and had just read it out loud in front of every ruling family in the syndicate.
The truth that had lived quietly between her and Nico for months, protected by silence and a locked drawer, was no longer theirs to guard.
It belonged to the room now.
Bruno turned slowly to face the stunned circle of Dons.
