Prologue
People like to pretend the world runs on honor.
It doesn’t.
It runs on gold... and the men willing to spill blood for it.
I suppose that’s where this story begins. With gold. A great deal of it, buried in the earth like a dragon’s hoard. Enough to start wars. Enough to make decent men turn into animals.
The gold belonged toLord Velmere.
Now there was a man people loved to hate.
Cruel bastard. Moneylender. Slave master. Charged interest so high that half the countryside spent their lives crawling under his boot just to breathe another year. If a farmer missed a payment, Velmere took the land. If a merchant failed him, Velmere took the shop. And if a debtor had nothing left...
Well.
There were always slave chains.
Men whispered about killing him for years.
Turns out, whispers eventually grow teeth.
The night they came for him, the whole town turned. Servants. Guards. Even the slaves he’d spent decades buying and breaking. Funny how loyalty dries up the moment a tyrant starts to bleed.
But Lord Velmere wasn’t a fool.
He knew his number was up.
And before the mob reached his doors, he sent away the only thing he ever loved.
His daughter.
Lady Seraphine Velmere.
Now that’s where things get interesting.
Because Seraphine wasn’t like the girls nobles usually raise. She had a mind sharp enough to slice a purse in half. Helped her father build half his fortune before she’d even seen twenty winters.
But clever girls make the same mistake as clever men.
They think the world will always stay the way it is.
That night she learned otherwise.
The mob burned the Velmere estate to the ground.
Her father died screaming inside it.
And his daughter... disappeared.
Most folks think the story ends there.
Noble house destroyed. Tyrant dead. Justice done.
But that’s the problem with people.
They never bother looking at what crawls out of the ashes.
Because while one half of this story was running for her life...
The other half was rotting in a prison cell.
A violent young bastard namedDarrian Varg.
And the judge who finally let him out had a very particular sense of humor.
He told the man he could have his freedom.
All he had to do was buy a slave.
And marry her.
Funny thing about fate...
Sometimes it doesn’t look like destiny.
Sometimes it looks like chains.
