Sebastian Blake – First Person
I don't pace.
I don't get angry.
Not visibly.
But something about the way she flinched this morning—like she expected to be beaten for existing—has me standing in the center of my study, still in the same black shirt I wore to the auction, hands clenched, heart steady.
Because fury doesn't help.
Control does.
I pick up my phone.
"Dimitri," I say, when the line clicks. "Wake the team. I want intel. Everything on her stepfather. Every account, every property, every phone number, every secret, every bastard he's ever spoken to."
"Understood," Dimitri says instantly. "Any limits?"
"None."
There's a pause.
Then: "Sir. Are we talking surveillance or disposal?"
I exhale. Cold. Calculated. My default setting.
"Surveillance for now," I say. "But if anything happens—if he so much as thinks about breathing in her direction again—"
I don't finish the sentence.
I don't need to.
Dimitri gets it.
"Anything else?"
"Yes," I say. "The men he brought to that auction. The ones who bid before I did. Track them too."
"Roger that."
I hang up.
No rage.
Just precision.
Because I know how men like him work. I've met a thousand versions of that stepfather. Small, pathetic tyrants in cheap cologne and bruised egos who think silence makes them gods.
But I've seen her.
I saw her in chains.
And before that—I saw her in a café. Laughing like she had sunlight in her throat. Clumsy. Bright. Loud in a way most people would've found annoying. I didn't.
Now I understand.
Now I know what she was surviving just to smile like that.
He's already dead.
He just doesn't know it yet.