I poured a glass of amber liquid, the ice clinking against the crystal like a countdown. My office was dark, the only light coming from the sprawling city skyline below—a city I supposedly ruled.
But I didn't feel like a King. I felt like a man who had been ghosted by a woman he had already buried.
It had been days since Chloe had performed the surgery on my brother. Even now, the memory of her in that operating room felt like a fever dream. She had been clinical. Cold. She had moved with a precision that made my best enforcers look like amateurs. When she had walked out and told me he was stable, she didn't look for a thank you. She looked at me like I was a stain on her expensive floor.
I took a sip of the drink, the burn matching the fire in my gut.
She had faked her death. For five years, I had carried the weight of her "end," only to find out she had been building an empire out of my sight. The hospital, the security, the sheer wealth she moved with—it wasn't just a life; it was a fortress. She hadn't just run away; she had replaced me.
"Is the stranger mad at us? He looks angry."
Leo's voice echoed in my head, sharper than any blade. Stranger. My own flesh and blood had looked at me with those eyes—my eyes—and saw nothing but a man at a dinner table. Not a father. Not a protector. Just a stranger.
She had kept him from me. She had raised Reed in the shadows and taught him that his father was a man in a drawer with old receipts. The bitterness was a physical weight in my chest. I hit the table with my knuckles and it sent everything on the table including the bottle of the scotch I was drinking off the table. The remaining drink inside poured out as the bottle and glass cup broke into two. How dare she. At one point, I blamed myself for her death and mourned for her like I have never mourned for anyone in my life.
She was giving me conditions now. Me. "Sir?" Elias's voice came through the intercom, breaking my spiral. "The report on Dr. C's financial backers is in. It's... clean. Too clean. She isn't just a surgeon, Asher. She's a major shareholder in three international medical tech firms. She doesn't need your money. She never did."
I gripped the glass until my knuckles turned white. That was the real "Face-Slap." I had spent years thinking I was the one with the power, the one who could provide. But Chloe had made herself untouchable.
I looked at the obsidian coin on my desk—the one she had mocked. She didn't want my protection. She wanted my silence.
But as I looked at the surveillance footage of her SUV leaving the restaurant, I knew she was wrong about one thing. She thought her wealth made her safe. She thought her success was a shield. She didn't realize that in this city, the higher you build your tower, the easier it is for your enemies to see where to aim.
She might be a genius with a scalpel, but I was the master of the hunt. And if I had to burn down her perfect, wealthy world just to make my son remember my name, I would.
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