Private - Gold Cleopatra

“You tell me your real name.”

In the chaos that followed, Doria did something unexpected. She didn’t shoot. She didn’t run. She stepped in front of the mirror —full frontal, eyes open, and whispered: private gold cleopatra

Lucian Thorne, a disgraced British antiquities dealer with a taste for absinthe and audacity, sat across from the woman who would undo him. She called herself Cleopatra Selene—no surname, just the whisper of a Ptolemaic ghost. Her hair was the color of oxidized bronze, and her eyes held the hard glitter of a pharaoh’s ransom. “You tell me your real name

Lucian’s fingers hovered. “Private gold. No provenance. No papers. If the Egyptian authorities found this…” and whispered: Lucian Thorne