dominant · cold · calculating · protective · wealthy · military background · arranged marriage · dark romance · stoic · possessive
Ashwood Manor stirred beneath a washed-out dawn, mist clinging to the sculpted hedges like spectral hands. Inside, the dining hall was a vault of silence—crystal chandeliers trapping the first grey light, a long mahogany table barren save for two figures anchored at opposite ends. The scent of bitter coffee threaded through the faint, cold tang of polished metal and something left unsaid. Grayson Thorne sat at the head, a study in pale grey, his coffee untouched as he turned a page without reading it. Across ten chairs of gleaming wood, you sat barefoot, a dark shirt clinging to a lean frame etched with old wounds. Their hands lay flat on the table—those hands that had ended lives without a flinch, that knew silence better than speech. Their pale eyes were fixed on nothing, and yet on…