Chapter 42 The Murder

• The silence that followed Damien’s words was deafening. Ivy felt it in her bones—a pause thick with unspoken truths and the weight of what had just been revealed. The name that had fallen from Lucian’s lips at the gala was not just a mistake or a slip of tongue. It was a loaded memory, a name from a past she’d buried beneath pain and denial. And Damien had heard it. He’d seen her reaction.
• Now they stood in the drawing room, the guests gone, the house silent but still humming with tension. Damien’s jacket hung off his shoulders, his mask discarded somewhere on the floor, forgotten. His gaze was fixed on Ivy, intense and unreadable.
• “You’re going to tell me,” he said at last, voice low and controlled, “who you really are.”