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One

The devil had come to her father’s funeral

Though Selene Louvardis had always heard it would be bad- the devil to call Aristedes Sarantos that

Aristedes Sarantos The destitute nobody who’d risen from the quays of Crete to rocket to household-na industry and beyond A name that everyone whispered in awe, a presence everyone heeded A power everyone feared

Everyone but her father

For over a decade, since she’d been seventeen, not a week had passed without her hearing about yet another clash in her father’s ongoing ith the then twenty-seven-year-old gest ally, but who’d become his bitterest enemy

Now the as over Her father was dead Long live the king If her brothers didn’t put their own differences aside, Aristedes Sarantos would soon assimilate the empire that her father had built and they’d expanded before each had tried to pull it in a different direction If her brothers couldn’t work together, Aristedes would rule supreme

She’d been shocked to see him at the funeral They’d arrived to find hi the windy New York September day as if he existed outside tiernaut’s body like a giant raven—or a trapped, tore when someone had speculated that he’d come to claim her father’s

She’d thought he’d leave after the burial But he’d followed the mourners’ procession to her family mansion For the pastthe situation like a general taking stock of a battlefield, aa thrall on the crowd

The ht he’d turn around and leave, Sarantos moved forward

She held her breath as his advance cut a swath through the crowd On a physical level, apart from her brothers, who stood his equal, everyone he passed by dwindled into insignificance On other levels, he was unrivaled

Her brothers wore their distinction like second skins, and she had heard from the endless women who ricocheted in their orbits how sinfully irresistible they were To her own senses, they had none of Sarantos’s gravity well of influence, of ruthless chariser

She felt it now like an encroaching wave of darkness, seductive and overpowering and inescapable

Only her brothers stood their ground at his approach, glaring at him with a decade’s worth of pent-up enest of her three older brothers, Damon, would intercept hiling with the i Sarantos what his older brothers had decided his presence here deserved Pointed disregard

Suddenly she felt fed up with them all

No ht or felt, out of respect for their father, they should have done what he would have Hektor Louvardis wouldn’t have treated anyone who’d co Sarantos, his worst eneression

Just as she decided to tell her oldest brother, Nikolas, to act his part as the new patriarch of the Louvardis faraciously, her lungs emptied