Darius Nyx Vale did not believe in accidents. Every success, every empire he had built, every silent enemy buried under his hand—none of it had been chance. Control was the law by which he survived.
And Aresha Silas defied it.
He sat in his study, the glow of his desk lamp illuminating a stack of files. Pages sprawled before him, each filled with threads of her past pulled by the best investigators money could buy. Yet half her life was missing—erased as if someone had burned her existence off the earth.
From age four to twelve: nothing. No schools, no records, no photographs. No whispers in the underworld until the emergence of the Nine Cloud Abyssal—a naval organization so vast, so disciplined, it rivaled governments themselves.
Darius leaned back in his chair, tapping his pen against the desk, his jaw tight.
The dragon and phoenix tatoo. The silver hair. The aura she carried, like someone forged not in safety but in fire.
And now—two children, his children.
Aresha Lilith Silas was not a puzzle. She was a storm. A storm he could not map, could not predict. And storms destroyed everything in their path.
Yet… when he had seen her crouched before Draven and Saleena, moonlight tangled in her silver hair, he had felt something foreign tighten in his chest. Not fear. Not anger. Something worse.
Need.
The household erupted into chaos an hour later.
Guards thundered down corridors. Maids whispered of locked doors and empty rooms. The children were gone.
Darius's fury split the estate like a blade. His voice, sharp and cold, cut through every man under his command. "Find them. Now."
But it was not Darius who found them first.
Aresha did.
Her instincts pulled her toward the forbidden garden—an inner courtyard where the koi pond mirrored the moonlight. And there, by the water's edge, sat two tiny figures.
Saleena dipped her fingers into the pond, laughing as koi nibbled her skin. Draven sat cross-legged, watching the stars reflected in the water, a calm far older than his years.
When Saleena spotted Aresha, she sprang up and ran to her with a grin bright enough to banish shadows."We wanted you to find us, Mama."
Aresha stopped dead. That word again. That knife twisting deeper.
She crouched, her silver hair spilling forward, her sharp eyes softening against her will. "You shouldn't be here."
Draven looked up, eyes steady. "We feel safe when you're here."
The words landed with a weight she could not carry, yet could not put down.
And then—footsteps. Heavy, swift.
Darius stormed into the courtyard, his coat flaring behind him, his fury so palpable the koi scattered. Relief flashed across his face when he saw his children whole, but it was short-lived. His gaze cut to Aresha, sharp and demanding.
The twins clung to her as though she were a lifeline.
And Aresha, who had spent her life tearing down walls and keeping the world at bay, found herself unable to push them away.