Margaret froze. She turned slowly, her eyes narrowing into slits. For a second, the mask of the benevolent matriarch slipped, revealing the predator underneath. “Make sure you remember that when my son realizes he’s been trapped,” she hissed. “Liam stays because he is loyal. But loyalty has a breaking point.”

I smiled. It wasn’t my usual smile—the polite, accommodating one I had worn for three years of Sunday dinners and passive-aggressive insults. This was a cold, dangerous curve of the lips.

“Oh, I’m counting on it,” I replied.

Margaret blinked, unsettled. She wasn’t used to me fighting back. She was used to Liam—gentle, successful, anxious Liam—who crumbled the moment her voice raised an octave. She had conditioned him well. He was thirty years old, a brilliant architect, yet he sought her approval with the desperation of a starving child. She had built his entire reality, brick by brick, ensuring that he believed he was too weak to survive without her.