Chapter 14

Scarlett came rushing from somewhere behind him, reaching for his arm, face tight under her makeup. "Julian — stop — that painting isn't worth this, you're not thinking—"

He threw her off. Hard. She caught the back of a chair, barely.

"Two million."

His eyes were fixed on the back of the room. On Lily. The vessels in them had burst. The pupils were blown wide. He wasn't really in the room — he was in some other place entirely, and the bidding was something he was doing with his body while his mind was somewhere else.

"Three million. Five million."

The auctioneer's voice wavered. The gavel hovered, uncertain.

Julian pushed through the hands that tried to slow him, every inch forward a small disaster — a broken social boundary, a security person stepping in — and kept going until Marcus's team formed a wall between him and the main table.

"Lily." His voice was ruined. "Look at me. Look — I'm paying for what I did. I remember — I remember everything you loved, everything you cared about. I'll buy all of it. However much it costs."

He was shouting at her and weeping at the same time, and the cameras were all trained on him, and none of that seemed to reach him.

The hammer came down on a number that would have bought the painting several times over.

Julian claimed it. Cradled the frame against his chest with unsteady hands and kept walking, stumbling forward toward the table.

"Lily… I'm bringing this to you… whatever you love, I'll get it for you… please just look at me — one look—"

Lily had not turned around.

Now she said something to Marcus, very quietly, barely moving her lips. Her voice carried just far enough. "It's getting loud in here. Shall we go?"

Marcus nodded. He settled his hand at the small of her back, and together, surrounded by his security, they walked out.

Smooth, unhurried.

She didn't look back once.

Julian stood with the painting in his arms and watched the space where she'd been.

The painting, which had felt like everything a moment ago, went cold and heavy in his grip.

He stared at the canvas — at the shapes and colours that had seemed, for one delirious instant, like a way back to something — and let out a sound low in his chest.

Then he raised the frame and hurled it against the floor.

Crash.

The glass casing exploded. The shards spread across the polished marble. Several pieces found his hands, his face. He felt the sting, distantly. Blood ran.

He went down onto his knees in the middle of it, palms pressed against the glass, head falling forward.

Scarlett hurried to him, reaching out: "Julian, your hands—"

"Get away from me." He shoved her back. She fell. He didn't look to see where she landed.

He lifted his face. His expression was one of a man who had just understood something terrible about himself — not the comfortable version of terrible, but the full, airless, irreducible truth.

He pointed at her. Or at nothing. At whatever it was that had brought him here.

The sound that came out of him was not language. It was a man coming apart.

Around him, the cameras kept flashing.

Julian Sterling, founder and chief executive of Sterling Group, on his knees in the wreckage of a charity auction, broken glass in his hands, bleeding quietly while the woman who'd once loved him walked out without ever turning around.

And Lily — three floors down, in the back of Marcus's car, the city lights running past the window — said nothing at all, and stared straight ahead, and was already somewhere else.