Chapter 23
Julian moved.
I lifted one hand.
“No.”
I wanted the camera to see Chase clearly. The doorbell camera. The interior hall camera. The street camera from the neighboring consulate. All of them.
Chase stepped closer.
“You planned this for months.”
“Yes.”
“You watched me with her.”
“Yes.”
“You set me up.”
“No,” I said. “I set up the room. You chose what to do inside it.”
His jaw worked.
Then his voice broke in a way I had not expected.
“I gave you everything.”
Something hot moved through me then.
Not rage.
A final grief.
“No,” I said. “You gave me your absence and called it ambition. You gave me your ego and called it destiny. You gave me another woman’s perfume in my sheets and called me paranoid for smelling it.”
Rain ran down his face like tears he had not earned.
“I was unhappy,” he said.
“I know.”
“You were impossible to reach.”
“I was beside you for ten years.”
“You were always judging me.”
“I was always saving you.”
He looked away.
For one second, the mask slipped, and I saw the boy inside the man. The hungry one. The one who had grown up in Ohio with a father who called him useless unless he won. The one who made himself brilliant because ordinary had never been safe.
I had loved that boy.
That was my mistake.
You cannot mother a man into mercy.
Chase looked back at me, eyes red.
“Was any of it real?”
I wanted to say no.
That would have been cleaner.
But revenge is not the same as lying.
“Yes,” I said. “That is why this took so long.”
He flinched.
Then, because tenderness frightened him more than hate, he reached for cruelty again.
“You’ll die alone in rooms you own.”
I smiled faintly.
“Maybe. But they’ll be mine.”
His face twisted.
A police car turned the corner slowly, called by building security. Chase saw it. He stepped back, raising both hands with theatrical disgust.
“This isn’t over,” he said.
“No,” I agreed. “Tomorrow is discovery.”
That was the first time I saw genuine terror in his eyes.
Not because of me.
Because of what he had written down.
Discovery is where lies go to lose their clothes.
After he left, I closed the door and stood in the foyer, shaking.
Julian did not touch me immediately.
He waited.
I appreciated that more than an embrace.