The Price of Protection

The flashbulbs in the hotel foyer were a strobe-lit interrogation, each pop of the shutter a reminder that Elena Vance was currently the city’s favorite tragedy. She stood frozen near the marble pillars, the silk of her gown feeling like a shroud. Forty-eight hours. That was the window the bank had given her before her family’s legacy—every heirloom, every deed, every memory—was liquidated to satisfy the debts Marcus had manufactured.

“Look at her,” a voice drifted from the periphery, sharp and dripping with the casual cruelty of the elite. “The ex-wife, clinging to the wreckage.”

Elena kept her chin high, though her pulse hammered a frantic rhythm against her collarbone. She reached for the clutch at her side, her thumb brushing th

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