Chapter 80: The Curse of Power
Cambria’s heart thundered. She stared at the man cloaked in shadow, the man who had haunted her thoughts for a decade. Lucien Vale. Her father. Her curse.
He stepped forward, slow and deliberate, as though time bowed before his presence. Nothing about him had changed not the cold steel in his eyes, nor the way he commanded the air around him. He was a storm-made flesh.
"I asked you a question," he said, voice smooth and dangerous. "Are you ready to choose a side?"
Cambria’s lips parted, but no sound came out. Her thoughts spiraled, colliding with memories long buried.
Lucien Vale had been declared dead when she was sixteen. A plane crash, they’d said. No survivors. But even back then, something had felt...off. Her mother’s silence. Evelyn’s sudden ascension. The sealed files. The disappearance of everything Cambria had once called truth.
And now, here he was not just alive, but watching, waiting.
"How?" she finally rasped. "How are you alive?"
Lucien walked toward the liquor cabinet in the corner like he owned the place which, technically, he did. He poured himself a glass of bourbon, his movements unhurried.
"The better question," he said, swirling the amber liquid, "is why."
Cambria didn’t move. Every instinct in her screamed to run or to kill.
Lucien took a sip and smiled. "Evelyn thought she had power. But she was playing a game ten layers beneath the real one. I let her believe she’d won when I vanished."