Chapter 256
“Let him,” I said. I touched the black diamond ring on the chain around my neck. “I’m not going as the victim tonight. I’m going as the executioner.”
“And how do you plan on getting close enough to snatch a necklace off a Thorne?”
I smiled. It was a cold, sharp smile.
“I don’t need to snatch it. I just need to make her drop it.”
I turned to leave. “Get the car, Alistair. We have a heist to pull.”
As we walked out into the night, the city lights flickered. Somewhere in a high-rise, Seraphina was drinking champagne, thinking she had won.
She didn’t know that the ghosts she thought she’d buried were coming for her. And this time, they weren’t stopping until she was in the ground.
The Galahad had been a fortress. A glittering, diamond-studded fortress we couldn’t breach.
I sat in the private room of a high-end café, the frustration of the previous night still simmering beneath my skin. The silence here cost more than the coffee. My heels clicked rhythmically against the hardwood floor—a nervous tic I couldn’t suppress.
I checked my watch.
The door opened. Liam Kensington walked in.
He didn’t look like the composed CEO I once knew. He looked like a man unraveling at the seams. His suit, usually armor-plated perfection, was rumpled, his tie slightly askew. Dark circles bruised the skin beneath his eyes, and a frantic, feverish energy burned in his gaze, setting my nerves on edge. His eyes, usually so guarded, lit up when they landed on me. It wasn’t hope. It was the desperate fixation of a drowning man spotting driftwood.
He started to stand before he’d even fully settled into the chair. “Skye.”
I didn’t smile. I didn’t offer my hand. I sat opposite him, ignoring the leather-bound menu the waiter tried to slide toward me. I waved the server away with a sharp flick of my wrist.
“You look… tired,” Liam said, his voice dropping into that soft, intimate register he used to reserve for apologies after missing our anniversaries. “How is your health? The bruising on your face from the party…”
“Cut the pleasantries, Liam,” I said. My voice was ice scraping against granite.
I reached into my bag, pulled out a file folder, and slammed it onto the table between us. The sound echoed in the quiet room. “Did you do this?”
Liam looked down at the papers. A notice from the bank: the sudden, unexplained withdrawal of the bridge loans for Sterling Corp.
𝘙𝘦𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘯𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭𝘴.𝘤𝘰𝘮
Internally, a cold surge of satisfaction went through me. The plan was working. The toxic debt I’d left inside the Sterling shell was finally collapsing the structure, exactly as I’d orchestrated from the shadows. But to Liam, I had to play the victim.
“Did you orchestrate the bank’s withdrawal?” I demanded, injecting a tremor of fabricated panic into my voice. “Is this your way of forcing me back? By starving my company?”
Liam’s face crumbled. He looked genuinely shocked, his mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water. “No! Skye, I swear to you. I didn’t… I wouldn’t do that. Not anymore.”
He reached across the table, his fingers brushing the back of my hand.
I recoiled as if he were a lit match. I pulled my hand back, tucking it into my lap, rubbing the skin where he’d touched me as if to scrub away the sensation.
“Then who?” I asked, though I already suspected. The banks protecting themselves. Or simply the inevitable gravity of a collapsing star.
Liam leaned forward, eyes desperate. “It doesn’t matter who pulled the loans. I can fix it. I liquidated the trust fund my grandfather set up for me. It’s not tied to the Kensington accounts. It’s clean money.”
He pulled a checkbook from his jacket pocket. His hands were trembling. “I can bail out Sterling Corp. I can pay off the immediate debts. You don’t have to declare bankruptcy. You don’t have to go through with this… this humiliating artist debut.”
I looked at the checkbook. Then I looked at him.