It was an act of love, encoded in legal language, a fortress built around a future generation.

And Dorian had read that fortress and found the one way to turn it into a trap.

Where her grandfather had written a child protects the legacy, Dorian had read the absence of a child unlocks it. He had taken the old man’s love and inverted it into a motive for the cruelest thing he did.

Linnea sat with that for a long moment — the terrible thought that her grandfather’s care had, through no fault of his own, drawn the map that led Dorian to a surgical table where she lay unconscious.

It was not her grandfather’s fault.

He could not have imagined a man like Dorian.