The air in the Grand Starlight didn't just feel cold anymore.Iit felt thin, as if the oxygen was being sucked out of the building by some invisible, gluttonous vacuum. Darien moved through the gilded corridors not like a man, but like a localized weather event. The refined, calculated leader of Ispire Inc. had vanished. In his place was something far older and infinitely more dangerous.
His initial fury, yes, that jagged, petty jealousy that had driven him to the balcony with a woman whose name he'd already deleted from his memory, was gone. It had been replaced by a sharp-edged, crystalline anxiety that he absolutely refused to name.
"Amara?" he hissed, pushing past a heavy set of double doors that led toward the western mezzanine.
No answer. Only the distant, mocking lilt of a violin concerto.
