Chapter 683

The reporter’s face drained of all color. His knees buckled. The microphone slipped from his fingers and clattered onto the wet pavement.

Dallas didn’t wait for an answer. He turned away and guided Eliza up the white marble steps.

The heavy carved doors of the chateau swung open.

The moment Dallas and Eliza crossed the threshold, the low murmur of the ballroom died. The silence was deafening. Hundreds of pairs of eyes — filled with jealousy, fear, and calculation — locked onto them.

Dallas didn’t slow his pace. He moved through the crowd like a king inspecting his subjects. The European elite instinctively parted, giving them a wide berth.

Then a sharp, joyful voice shattered the tension.

“Dad! Eliza!”

Azalea hiked up her priceless diamond-encrusted skirts and sprinted across the polished marble floor.

She slammed into Dallas’s chest with enough force to make him grunt. The lethal, freezing aura surrounding him vanished in a heartbeat. He wrapped his massive arms around his daughter and buried his face in her hair. A genuine, deeply relieved smile broke across his face.

Azalea squeezed him tight, then immediately let go and threw herself at Eliza.

She buried her face in Eliza’s neck. “Thank God,” Azalea choked out, her voice trembling with raw emotion. “Thank you for coming back.”

Eliza wrapped her arms around the younger girl and rubbed her back, her eyes softening with fierce maternal warmth. “We’re right here,” Eliza whispered. “We aren’t going anywhere.”

The European aristocrats watched the scene in absolute bewilderment.

In their world, family was a business transaction. Blood was a tool for leverage. Witnessing the most ruthless capitalist on earth display such naked, unguarded affection for his family was entirely incomprehensible to them.

Up on the raised dais, Jean-Paul Royal gripped his wooden beads tightly. His cloudy eyes narrowed. He understood in that moment that all the Royal blood in Azalea’s veins meant nothing. Her soul belonged entirely to the Koch family.

Azalea pulled back from the embrace. She took Dallas’s arm with one hand and Eliza’s hand with the other.

She lifted her chin, her eyes sweeping over the silent, judging crowd.

“Please allow me to introduce my father, Dallas Koch!” Azalea announced, her voice ringing clear and loud across the ballroom, vibrating with overwhelming, defiant pride. She turned slightly, extending her hand toward the woman in the blood-red gown. “And my mother — the undisputed matriarch of the Koch family — Eliza Koch.”

The word mother echoed off the high ceilings.

It was a brutal, public blow to every aristocrat who had whispered about Eliza’s orphan background. Azalea, heir to the Royal bloodline, had just bowed to her before all of Europe.

A slow, awkward smattering of applause started in the front row. Within seconds it swelled into a thunderous, entirely manufactured standing ovation.

Dallas smiled and patted Azalea’s hand.

But as the crowd clapped, he slowly lifted his gaze toward the second floor.

His eyes locked onto the dark, tinted glass of the VIP balcony. His jaw tightened. The muscles in his back coiled like a spring.

The snake was in the building.

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