Chapter 15

Sterling Group's executive suite had become a wreck.

Reports scattered everywhere, torn in places. Bottles against the skirting boards. Ashtrays overflowing. The air carried the dense, sour smell of someone who had been drinking and smoking for days in a sealed room without caring.

Julian sat folded in his chair behind the desk, unshaved, his collar stained, eyes tracking nothing through the grey window. The company's stock had been falling for weeks. Core executives had submitted their resignations, one after another. Banks and creditors were calling with increasing urgency. He had stopped answering.

He was a shell. He was consuming himself.

The office door opened quietly.

The private investigator he'd retained set a heavy manila envelope on the surface of the disaster.

"Mr. Sterling. You wanted everything verified. It's all there."

Julian's fingers had started trembling before he'd consciously registered he was reaching for it.

He tore the flap open.

Page one: Scarlett's complete medical records from multiple institutions. Her clotting values were entirely normal. No disorder. No treatment history. Nothing.

Page two: a handwritten statement from the nurse who had assisted that afternoon in the hospital corridor. She described, in precise, damning detail, receiving a significant cash transfer from Scarlett's account two days before the incident. She described agreeing to perform the staged emergency — the theatrical urgency, the implication of an uncontrollable bleed — for money.

Page three: a report from a private gynaecological clinic. Diagnosis, clearly stated: extensive endometrial damage due to multiple induced abortions. Not congenital. Not inherited. A condition Scarlett had created for herself and then attributed to fate.

Page four: a forensic technology assessment. The files that had disrupted the sculpture exhibition — intimate photographs of Lily — had been uploaded from devices registered to Scarlett's personal accounts.

She had done all of it.

She had fabricated the emergency that caused Lily to be bled. She had invented the diagnosis that gave Julian his justification for the cruelest act he'd ever committed against another human being. She had destroyed Lily's reputation and identity with photographs she herself had released.

And he had believed every word. He'd been handed every weapon she needed and he'd used them all, without question.

The images came in sequence, unstoppable now:

Lily on a hospital gurney, drained, barely conscious, while the needle pulled more of her blood to feed a lie.

Lily's face when the nurse told her she'd never carry a child.

Lily on the pavement in the middle of that scattered humiliation, calling him — the only person she might still have reached out to — and his cold, dismissive voice.

"—"

Julian came out of the chair like something snapping.

He upended the desk. The screen shattered. Keyboard, mouse, all of it hit the floor. The pages of the investigator's report lifted and drifted in the draft.

He seized his car keys and was gone.

The bedroom of the new house.

Scarlett had been sleeping, and was smiling faintly in her dream.

The door came off its hinges.

She screamed herself awake.

Julian crossed the room in three strides, caught her by the throat before she could properly sit up, and dragged her off the bed onto the floor.

"Tell me the truth." His voice was barely a voice. It sounded like something being dragged across stone. "The photographs at the exhibition — was that you? Your so-called illness — was that a performance? Did you fabricate everything to get her uterus removed? Did you?"

She clawed at his hands, gasping. "Julian — let me explain — it isn't what you—"

"I want a yes or a no."

In the face of that — the pressure, the absolute stillness in his eyes — her defences collapsed.

"Yes," she wheezed. "It was me. But I did it because I love you — she wasn't right for you, she could never give you—"

"Love." He looked at her with something that had moved entirely past anger. "You call this love."

He pulled her upright and threw her against the wall.

She slid to the floor with a cry, forehead hitting the decorative moulding, blood appearing immediately. She lay there shaking, stunned.

"Get out," Julian said. "Don't let me see your face in this city again. If I do, you won't have a life left worth living."

Scarlett ran. She didn't take her coat. She didn't take her shoes. In the driveway she left behind jewellery she'd collected piece by piece over two years.

A month later, someone spotted her in the dimly lit corner of the cheapest club in the city — heavy makeup over bruising she'd accumulated somewhere, wearing something she'd bought off a discount rack, sitting with a group of men who'd been drinking since afternoon, tolerating their hands on her, laughing when they required her to laugh, pouring drinks when they asked, because the only alternative was to be told to leave.

Julian had made a single phone call. His name was sufficient.

And Julian himself — rid of Scarlett at last — was in no better state.

Because the weather forecast was calling for a severe storm. And he had learned that Lily had a flight booked for the following morning, destination: the Calloway family estate in Zurich.

If she left on that plane, she was gone. Not gone like before — gone in a way he might have found her eventually. Gone for good.