Chapter 13 The Quiet Siege

• She didn’t rise with fire. She rose like smoke—slow, deliberate, suffocating. It began with the next shipment, not stolen but offered. A quiet olive branch wrapped in shadows and risk. Delivered by a man named Rafe, all jittery nerves and darting eyes. The kind of man Lucien never looked at twice. But she did. She offered him water. Sat across from him like his time mattered. And when he told her about a route Lucien no longer guarded, she didn’t smile. She simply nodded.
• Rafe walked out of her apartment with his shoulders straighter. He didn’t know her name. No one did. But he’d tell others. About the woman who spoke with the voice of someone who had once bled for a king—and now sharpened knives beneath her silence. It wasn’t loyalty she inspired. It was purpose. And purpose, she was learning, lasted far longer than fear.
• She didn’t have an army. She had believers. Mace, whose hands never stopped shaking until he held the wheel. Carla, who stitched up more wounds than a war doctor and never blinked. Vega, silent, unreadable, lethal. None of them owed her anything. But they came. And that meant more than any contract Lucien had ever bought with blood.