**Chapter 45**
**Anika's POV**
Before the chandelier accident.
Frost told me without meaning to.
That was always how it worked with him — he didn't lie to me, but he didn't always realize when he was giving things away either. We were in my apartment Thursday evening when he mentioned it, casually, the way he mentioned things he was pretending not to care about.
He had overheard Alex and Betha in the corridor at Tasty. Something about an invitation. The yearly gala. Both of them excited in the way people get excited when they've been let into a room they weren't supposed to reach yet.
He said it with his eyes on his phone and his voice carefully flat.
I said *oh, interesting* and changed the subject.
And then I waited until he left.
And then I made a phone call.
---
The Skippers were not the kind of people you found through conventional channels.
They were the kind of people you found when you had been operating at a certain level for long enough that the right doors started opening without you having to knock. I had used them once before — a business problem that needed a solution no lawyer could provide. They had been efficient, discreet, and entirely uninterested in the details of why.
I called their contact Friday morning.
I gave the instructions clearly and without emotion, the way you give any professional instruction — the venue, the target, the method, the timing. The chandelier above the center of the dance floor. The moment the floor was occupied. Clean. Untraceable. An accident in a room full of witnesses who would all confirm they had seen nothing but a terrible mechanical failure.
They asked no questions.
I paid what was asked.
And then I went to have my hair done.
---
I wore red to the gala because I always wore red when I needed to remind myself who I was.
Not the woman who had clawed her way out of nothing. Not the girl who had grown up with cold floors and empty cupboards and a father who sold things that weren't his to sell. Not the person who had spent fifteen years building a life out of pure calculated will.
Red was the version of me that had already won. The version that walked into rooms and owned them before she had said a single word.
I wore it and I felt it and I walked into that gala beside Frost with my hand light on his arm and my smile perfectly calibrated and I was — calm. The way I was always calm when the pieces were already in motion and all that remained was to watch them fall.
Frost was distracted from the moment we arrived.
I noticed but I didn't comment. I knew what was distracting him. Or rather — who.
She had arrived After us. Cossette Jonas in a forest green gown that did something irritating with her ginger hair, walking beside Bethany Kelman in midnight blue, the two of them moving through the entrance like they belonged here in a way that made something hot and unpleasant move through my chest.
I smiled at a woman I didn't care about and accepted a glass of champagne and watched Frost's eyes find his wife across the room without his permission.
*Don't,* I thought in his direction. *Don't you dare.*
He looked away.
But not quickly enough.
---
The evening moved the way these evenings always moved — slowly at first and then all at once. I positioned myself correctly, spoke to the people worth speaking to, laughed at the right moments, kept Frost close enough to signal ownership without being obvious about it.
I watched Cossette dance with Ray Lether.
Ray Lether.
His hand at her waist. Her face turned up toward his. The easy movement of two people who had been spending time together — too much time, clearly, given the comfort between them. Given the way he looked at her like she was something he had already decided to have.
The heat in my chest sharpened.
*She has nothing,* I reminded myself. *She is nothing. A girl playing at business with her dead father's scraps.*
But Ray Lether didn't look at her like she was nothing.
And Frost — I glanced at him — Frost was very deliberately not looking at the dance floor with the focused intensity of a man working extremely hard at not looking at something specific.
I put my hand on his arm.
He smiled at me. Automatic. Correct. But his eyes were doing something I didn't like.
*Soon,* I told myself. *This ends soon.*
---
The dance finished.
Ray released her and moved away and Cossette stayed where she was — in the center of the floor, alone for a moment, the lights catching the green of her dress and her hair and those infuriating blue eyes that she had inherited from a father who should have known better than to leave everything to a daughter instead of a wife.
I raised my champagne glass.
She tipped her head back slightly and looked up at the chandelier.
And I thought — *now.*
As if something had heard me, the sound came from above. That crack. That groan. The specific mechanical wrongness of something enormous giving way.
I watched the chandelier begin to fall.
I watched Cossette look up and freeze.
And I felt — nothing. Clean and cold and nothing. The way I always felt when something necessary was happening. She had been in my way since the moment her father introduced us. She had been an obstacle to everything I had built and everything I deserved and everything I had sacrificed to reach. She was standing in the center of a room that should have been mine, in a dress that should have been irrelevant, being looked at by men who should have been looking at me.
Not anymore.
I raised the glass to my lips.
And then someone moved.
Fast. Faster than I had seen anyone move in a room like this — cutting through the frozen crowd with the kind of speed that only exists when something more powerful than thought is driving it. He crossed the floor in seconds, in the time it took everyone else to register what was happening and stand still inside their own shock.
He threw himself over her.
His body covering hers completely as the chandelier came down.
The crash shook the room. Crystal and metal and light exploding across the floor. Screaming erupting from every direction. People stumbling backward, forward, reaching for each other.
And I stood completely still.
Because I knew who had moved.
Alaric Veynor.
I stared at the wreckage.
At the stillness where his body lay over hers beneath the debris.
Alaric Veynor — who I had known for three years. Who I had watched move through rooms with that particular careless confidence of someone who had never needed to run toward anything in his life because everything had always come to him. Who I had never once seen break composure for anyone or anything. Who treated even Frost — his closest friend, the person he had chosen over his own family — with an affection that was genuine but always measured. Always contained.
Alaric Veynor had just thrown his body over Cossette Jonas without a moment of hesitation.
Without a moment of calculation.
Without anything except pure instinct driving him across that floor before his mind had even caught up with his feet.
I lowered my champagne glass slowly.
*I never saw him run for anything,* I thought. *Not once. Not for anyone.*
Around me the room had collapsed into chaos — Betha screaming, Alex shouting, Ray already moving toward the wreckage with people helping to lift the debris piece by piece. Frost behind me, utterly still, the color gone from his face in a way I had never seen before.
And I stood in the middle of all of it, red dress and perfect hair and a champagne glass in my hand, watching them dig Alaric Veynor out of the wreckage of my plan.
*His eyes,* I thought. *In the seconds before he moved — I saw his eyes.*
I had seen men look at women many ways in my life. Desire. Possession. Calculation. Performance. I knew every variation because I had used every variation to my advantage at one point or another.
What I had seen in Alaric's eyes in that fraction of a second before he moved was none of those things.
It was something older and simpler and far more dangerous.
*Is he in love with her?*
The thought arrived cold and clarifying, the way important thoughts always did.
*Is he in love with this girl?*
Frost's best friend. Frost's manager. The person Frost trusted above everyone else in his professional life and most of his personal one.
In love with Frost's wife.
I looked at the wreckage. At Betha kneeling beside them crying in a way that had no performance in it whatsoever. At Ray and Alex working to lift the debris with focused desperate efficiency. At Frost standing three feet from me, frozen, his eyes on the pile of crystal and metal that contained his best friend and his wife.
His expression was unreadable.
Mine, I was certain, was not.
Because something had just shifted in my calculation — something fundamental and cold and requiring immediate reassessment.
I had planned to remove Cossette from the board.
I had not planned for the possibility that removing Cossette might destroy Alaric.
And I had not — not once, in all my careful planning — considered what Frost would do if something happened to both of them.
The ambulance sirens were already audible in the distance. Betha had moved fast.
I set my champagne glass down on a nearby table with a careful, quiet click.
*This,* I thought, watching the chaos unfold around me with the focused attention of someone already planning the next move, *is a complication.*
But complications were things I solved.
I had always solved them.
I smoothed my dress, composed my expression into something appropriate for a woman witnessing a terrible accident, and began to move toward the wreckage with my face arranged in concern.
*Think, Anika.*
*Think faster.*
Author's Note: Thank you for reading, ❤️ . A vote might not seem like much to you, but it means a lot to me. See you in the next chapter.