Chapter 6 - The Unpaid Debt|
The ballroom collectively gasped.
Victoria’s jaw dropped. "Alexander, what are you talking about? She’s a maid! Her father was a nobody!"
"Shut up, Victoria," Alexander snapped, his tone so cold and venomous that she flinched backward as if she’d been struck.
He turned his full attention back to me, taking a slow step forward.
"Six years ago, I was twenty-six," Alexander said softly, speaking only to me now. "My father had just been assassinated, and our rivals wanted to wipe out our bloodline. I was ambushed near Astoria. I had a bullet wound in my ribs and three men cornered me with knives."
He reached up, unbuttoning his suit jacket and pulling back his shirt collar just enough to reveal a jagged white scar running along his collarbone.
"I was ready to die," Alexander continued. "Then an unarmed man stepped out of the dark. He didn't know who I was. He didn't care that I was an Ashford. He fought off three armed men using a fluid, silent technique I had never seen in my life."
He looked at my hands.
"He disarmed them, gave me time to run to my car, and took a fatal blade wound in the process. When my men went back to find him, he was gone. We searched for years, but we never found his family."
Alexander reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a thick leather wallet, and took out a folded, faded piece of paper. He slowly unfolded it and handed it to me.
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It was a police report sketch of my father's face.
"I swore on my father's grave that if I ever found the family of the man who died for me, I would grant them anything in this world," Alexander said, his voice trembling slightly. "I have searched six years for you, Sophia Reyes."
