business venture?”
Sebastian stood in the monitoring room, his jaw tight. He looked at Clara. “Do you want me to let him in?”
Clara looked at the screen—at the man who had traded her like a commodity. “No,” she said, her voice trembling but certain. “He didn’t sell me to a billionaire. He sold me to a ‘monster.’ He doesn’t deserve the man behind the mask.”
Then came Vanessa. She didn’t come for money; she came for the prize she thought she had lost. She appeared at a high-society gala a week later, wearing a dress that left nothing to the imagination, sliding toward Sebastian like a serpent.
“Sebastian, darling,” she purred, ignoring Clara entirely. “What a delicious trick. We all knew you were eccentric, but this? It’s genius. Now that the joke is over, we can stop pretending with this… little servant girl, can’t we? You need a woman
