Prologue — Veil of Vengeance
The rain fell like mourning veils—soft, soundless, and unrelenting—as the Greyborne estate crumbled into ash and memory.
Fire had licked the silk drapes. Blood had painted the marble floors. And in the hush that followed, only grief remained—bitter, cold, and endless.
Dorian Greyborne knelt beside his father's broken body, hands slick with crimson, breath shallow and shaking. A few steps away, his mother lay still, her eyes wide with the last terror they had witnessed.
They had been murdered.
And the world moved on as if they were never there.
It was Evelyn who held him afterward—Evelyn, with honeyed lies and tear-streaked cheeks. She had promised him forever. Sworn she would never leave. And he had believed her. Because in the ruins of his life, she was the last light he clung to.
Until she extinguished that too.
He found her weeks later—smiling in the arms of the very man who had ordered his family's deaths. A crest of betrayal gleamed at her throat. Her treachery came not with a dagger, but with a kiss—given to another.
That night, something in Dorian Greyborne died.
The boy who once loved poetry, lanterns, and Evelyn's laughter was buried beneath the weight of loss. In his place rose a man sculpted from silence and vengeance. He vanished from Valemire, presumed dead—a ghost lost to grief.
But ghosts do not rest.
They linger. They remember.
And they return.
Years have passed. Now, Dorian walks once more among the living—not with fury or fire, but with elegance, charm, and a smile as sharp as any blade. He is the gentleman no one expected. The shadow behind their laughter. The reckoning beneath the waltz.
And Evelyn?
She will be the last to fall.