The manor’s war room, once a place of magical strategy, had become a bunker for legal warfare. Case files were stacked like battlements. Luca, his brotherly protectiveness forged into a razor-sharp weapon, stood before a whiteboard covered in a web of corporate structures, shell companies, and legal precedents. He was no longer the jealous brother trying to sabotage a romance; he was a magical ethics lawyer, and The Aetherium Council was his white whale.

“They’re a ...