CHAPTER 247: CHAPTER 247: DIAMONDS SUIT YOU

The interior was lined in deep navy velvet, framing a collar that caught the afternoon light, solid platinum links studded with flawless diamonds, every facet sharp enough to hurt the eyes. Beneath it lay a square of black card edged in gold leaf, the handwriting across it so precise and deliberate that Lucas’s breath stalled before he’d even finished reading.

’Diamonds suit you, Lucas. You’re breathtaking when you’re mine.’

The words felt like a hand closing around his throat, too familiar, too perfectly steeped in the voice of another lifetime. Christian Velloran’s voice rose unbidden in the back of his mind, that same syrupy cruelty he had used to whisper against Lucas’s skin as cold metal locked around his neck.

The diamonds caught the light again, stabbing at his eyes. Lucas hated them, hated the sharp glitter, the cold weight, and the way they always felt like decoration for a possession instead of a person. He hated collars even more. And most of all, he hated that a single object could drag him back into a place he’d sworn never to return to.

Something in his chest went hollow. The room blurred at the edges, sound growing distant except for the muffled echo of that voice, that life, that mark.

"Your Grace." Windstone’s voice was sharper now, closer. "Put it down."

Lucas didn’t move. His gaze was locked on the collar, on the way the diamonds seemed to sparkle like a thousand watching eyes.

Windstone crossed the space in two strides, snapping the lid closed with a firm, final motion. His pale green eyes were hard behind the glass of his lenses. "This doesn’t stay here."

Lucas blinked once, the movement slow, mechanical. He didn’t argue. Didn’t say anything.

Windstone signaled a guard with a clipped motion, already walking the box out of the room.

Alone again for the briefest moment, Lucas sat frozen, the weight of the words pressing down on him until it felt like even breathing was a conscious decision. He had promised himself he wouldn’t let the past pull him under again. But right now, it was dragging him under with thousands of hands.

It was the scent first... sweet flowers, overripe and rotting, clinging to his skin and hair no matter how hard he’d scrubbed. Then the voices came, slipping past the walls he’d built, the ones he’d kept buried so deep he thought they were gone. They weren’t gone. They were laughing, coaxing, and ordering, their tones sliding between false affection and sharp commands.

Hands followed... always hands. Too many to count, too many to name, each one taking without asking, without caring, without ever stopping. The press of bodies, the way the air disappeared from his lungs, the cold metal biting into the skin of his throat as he choked on a voice telling him to be still, to be good.

He remembered the weight pinning him down, the smell of sweat and perfume mingling until it made him nauseous. The brutality of being used, over and over, until the difference between one moment and the next was only measured in the breaths he could steal. The alphas who didn’t care that he couldn’t breathe, that he was vomiting after each one, that his voice broke when he begged them to stop.

The memory made his chest tighten until it hurt, until the room in front of him blurred into a haze of heat and cold and diamond-sharp light. The collar wasn’t in the room anymore, Windstone had taken it, but the weight of it sat on his shoulders all the same, closing in like the walls of a cage.

Somewhere far away, footsteps moved in the hall, muffled voices exchanged in calm tones, but they didn’t reach him. The world felt dim, distant. All he could hear was the echo of that message. ’Diamonds suit you, Lucas. You’re breathtaking when you’re mine.’

It sounded less like a gift and more like a claim, like a reminder that no matter how far he had come, there were still people in this world who thought of him as something to own.

And that thought made it harder to breathe than anything else.

—

Trevor stepped out of the car with the kind of lazy satisfaction that came from winning an argument in half the expected time. For once, the rest of the day was his. No meetings, no calls, no carefully choreographed public appearances. Just hours he planned to spend bothering his bitty omega, dragging him out on a date he’d already mapped down to the dessert.

The heavy front doors of the mansion swung open before he could reach for them, but the faces that met him weren’t the ones he expected. Agitated staff moved quickly through the hall, their usual polished calm fraying at the edges. A pair of footmen nearly collided rounding a corner, one carrying a black lacquered box under his arm like it might explode.

Trevor’s easy smile slipped. "What happened?"

Then he saw Windstone.

In all the years Trevor had known him, he’d never seen his butler mad. Sharp, yes. Displeased, certainly. But this... this was quiet, seething fury, the kind that simmered cold instead of hot, making the air in the hall feel heavier.

Windstone’s pale green eyes locked on Trevor as he approached. "Upstairs. Drawing room. Now."

Trevor’s stomach turned to stone. He didn’t ask questions. Windstone’s tone left no space for them. He took the stairs two at a time, following the lingering threads of tension like a scent.

He found Lucas in the front drawing room.

The sunlight poured through the tall windows, catching in his blond hair, but the stillness in him was wrong. Too still. He sat on the velvet settee as if carved from ice, eyes unfocused, shoulders just slightly drawn in, not enough for anyone else to notice, but enough for Trevor to feel it like a punch.

It was the same as Lucas had been when he’d crossed paths with Christian Velloran almost a year ago at his coming-of-age gala. The same stillness, the same brittle mask over something far darker clawing its way to the surface. Back then, Trevor hadn’t known, no one had, what Lucas was hiding beneath that reaction.

But now he did. And the knowledge made his vision edge red.

He forced himself to take a slow breath, to keep the fury in check. Then, without a word, he crossed the room, lowered himself to the settee, and pulled Lucas into his arms.

The scent of his own pheromones slipped into the air. Calming, grounding, and warm with the weight of home. He didn’t press him for answers, didn’t ask what had happened. The way Lucas’s fingers curled faintly against his sleeve, the near-imperceptible tremor in his breath told him enough.