Gabrielle Serenity was twenty years old and everything people dreamed of being. The only daughter of the Serenity empire — a chain of luxury hotels, sprawling estates, and whispered wealth — she had grown into the image of perfection the world demanded from her. Diamond eyes, porcelain skin, lips that never smiled unless they had to. Her beauty was effortless, haunting even, the kind that photographers worshiped and strangers envied.

But behind the silk sheets and marble walls, Gabrielle was hollow. The mansion she lived in was quiet, too quiet, echoing with the ghosts of her parents’ laughter that died along with them years ago. No family, no warmth — just money, servants, and a silence that gnawed at her mind until it bled into darker thoughts she never dared speak aloud.

Once upon a time, in high school, she chased her numbness through smoke and pills — a beautiful addict with trembling hands and broken dreams. The tabloids called her “the fallen heiress.” She called herself nothing at all.

Now, at twenty, she was clean — mostly. But the man in her life wasn’t. He was twice her age, a forty-year-old drug lord who ruled his world the way storms rule the sky — cold, dangerous, and untouchable. People whispered about them in fear and fascination. To outsiders, he corrupted her. But the truth was, Gabrielle had stopped being innocent long before he arrived.

And still, every night, when the city fell quiet, she sat by her window and wondered if the darkness inside her was her punishment or her only peace.