The morning at the estate slammed into us like a hangover from someone else's funeral—sharp, unwelcome, and smelling faintly of blood money.
Charlotte felt happy. Genuinely, unapologetically, balls-to-the-wall happy. Which should've been the default setting now that Dmitri Volkov—sex-trafficking piece of shit extraordinaire—had finally graduated from breathing to room-temperature corpse.
The kind of poetic justice that makes you wonder if the universe occasionally takes freelance gigs. Champagne. Confetti. Maybe a quick lap dance on the grave.
Standard victory protocol.
Charlotte felt it.
She stood in the kitchen, phone clutched like a talisman, scrolling the news with a face that ran the full emotional obstacle course: shock, vicious satisfaction, a flicker of Catholic-school guilt, then back to satisfaction like her conscience was doing laps on a short track.
