He walked barefoot across the priceless Persian rug. Fresh blood dripped from his right arm, leaving a trail of red spots on the intricate wool. He moved with the silent, terrifying grace of a predator that had just tasted blood.

He pushed open the heavy double doors of the master bedroom.

The room was bathed in the dim, warm glow of crystal wall sconces. Cecelia stood near the fireplace in a sheer, expensive silk nightgown, a crystal flute of champagne in her hand, her posture arranged with practiced, aristocratic seduction.

Then she saw the blood.

She gasped and dropped the pose, stepping forward with her hands outstretched to check his wounds.

Gideon’s eyes snapped to hers. The sheer, crushing weight of his stare nailed her feet to the floor.

He crossed the distance in three massive strides. He snatched the champagne flute from her hand and hurled it against the stone fireplace. The glass shattered into a thousand pieces, the sharp crack making Cecelia flinch.

His large, cold hand clamped around her jaw. He squeezed hard, forcing her head up so she had no choice but to look directly into his manic, destructive eyes.

Cecelia’s lips trembled. She tried to whisper something soft, something to calm the beast.

But Gideon wasn’t looking at her. His gaze pierced straight through her face, fixed on a ghost that wasn’t in the room.

“Eliza,” Gideon whispered.

The name was a dark, gravelly rasp dredged from somewhere beneath sanity. He poured every ounce of his psychotic jealousy and bitter defeat into the single word.

A hot wave of humiliation washed over Cecelia. But the greed for the Sterling family’s political power ran deeper than her pride. She swallowed her dignity and leaned into his grip, trying to cater to his madness.

Gideon shoved her backward onto the massive, velvet-draped bed.

What followed was not intimacy. It was destruction — a punishing, brutal act in which Gideon used his body as a weapon, trying desperately to fill the bleeding void in his own sanity through domination of the person beneath him.

Cecelia cried out in pain. Her nails dug into the uninjured muscles of his back, drawing thin lines of blood — a reflexive grasp at some small anchor of control in the violence.

That tiny act of resistance triggered something catastrophic in Gideon’s mind.

He saw Eliza’s dark eyes. He saw the way she had looked at him in the tunnel — with absolute, unbreakable defiance.

His hands moved to Cecelia’s throat.

He wrapped his fingers around her neck and squeezed, cutting off her oxygen entirely. He watched the manufactured seduction in her eyes vanish and be replaced by raw, primal terror. She clawed at his wrists, her face turning a terrifying shade of red.

He held her there, on the razor’s edge.

Just as her eyes began to roll back, Gideon let go.

He stood up from the bed, his chest heaving. He looked down at her with absolute contempt as she gasped and sobbed into the ruined silk sheets.

He turned his back on her.

.

.

.