The ballroom shimmered with low golden light, the clink of crystal and murmured conversation floating like perfume through the air. Lucian Vale moved through the crowd with the effortless grace of a man who commanded every room without needing to speak. People approached him—investors, ministers, magnates—each eager for a word, a glance, a secured connection. He answered with measured nods and razor-sharp replies, his tone smooth, composed, untouchable.

Nothing in this room surprised him. Not the ambition behind smiles, the practiced elegance of posture, or the glittering diamonds worn like badges of power. He had seen this world from every angle. He had mastered it.

And then he saw her.

The conversation around him dissolved. His breath stalled—not outwardly, never visibly, but inside, his pulse snapped like an electric wire.

She stood at the far end of the hall, near the tall glass doors leading into the moonlit terrace, captured in a haze of soft blue illumination. Her gown was unlike anything else in the room—delicate, celestial, almost unreal. Veils of sheer fabric draped around her like falling starlight, each thread catching the light and reflecting it in tiny constellations. As she moved, the dress didn’t merely shift… it flowed, as if the night sky itself had chosen to follow her.

Her walk was poetic: every step unhurried, every movement filled with quiet confidence and gentle grace. She wasn’t trying to be seen. And yet, she was impossible not to notice.

Her smile was subtle but warm, the kind that softened the air around her, the kind that could turn even the coldest silence into something alive. She greeted people with a polite nod, listened more than she spoke, and carried herself with a serenity that didn’t need to prove anything.

Lucian watched, frozen in place, his perfectly composed world thrown off balance by a single woman.

He had built empires. He had stared down enemies. He had negotiated deals worth billions without so much as a tremor in his voice.

But this? This hit him with the force of something he had never prepared for.

Love at first sight was a concept he had always dismissed—something poetic, irrational, beneath logic. And yet here he stood, unable to stop staring, unable to think, unable to breathe.

For the first time in his life, he wasn’t calculating. He wasn’t evaluating. He was simply… spellbound.

Her gown shimmered as she turned, catching a cascade of glittering points like stars being born. The light brushed her cheek in a soft glow, and Lucian felt a sensation he hadn’t known in years—

Hope. Longing. Possibility.

Someone nearby spoke his name, but he didn’t respond. His sharp mind, capable of absorbing every detail in a room at once, was focused solely on her.

The woman who walked like a dream. Who smiled like dawn. Who made the world, for the first time in his life, feel real.

Lucian Vale felt his composure crack—and he welcomed it. Because he knew, deep in the part of him that still remembered what it was like to want something for no logical reason:

His life had just changed.