Chapter 258
I handed the contract back to him.
Julian smirked. It wasn’t a nice smile. It was the smile of a man who had just acquired a very expensive, very dangerous toy.
“Welcome to hell, Skye,” he whispered as the car dipped into the underground garage of Vance Media.
The elevator ride to Julian’s office was silent. The numbers ticked up, each one taking me further away from the Skye Sterling who used to host tea parties and worry about floral arrangements.
We stepped into his office. It was a minimalist fortress of glass and steel. Julian walked to a side table and poured himself a glass of water, his hands steady today. He ignored me for a full minute, letting the weight of my decisions settle on my shoulders.
“When do I start?” I asked, breaking the silence.
Julian pressed a button on his desk. A wall-sized screen lit up, filled with graphs, photos of me, and heat maps of social media sentiment.
“You’ve already started,” he said. He pointed to a graph spiking in red. “Your infamy is higher than any A-list celebrity right now. They hate you. They think you’re a spoiled heiress who destroyed her family for sport. They think you’re delusional for trying to be a singer.”
He turned to me. “That red is fuel. But raw fuel explodes. We need to refine it.”
He checked his watch. “You have twenty-four hours. Settle your affairs. Inform Alistair you’ll be going dark—he knows the drill, but tell him not to interfere. Pack one suitcase. Nothing branded. Nothing identifiable.”
“Twenty-four hours?” I blinked. “That’s not enough time to—”
“Time is a luxury you sold when you signed that paper,” Julian cut me off. “Go.”
I left the building in a daze. The moment I stepped onto the sidewalk, flashbulbs blinded me. Paparazzi swarmed like locusts.
“Skye! Is it true you’re bankrupt?”
“Did you really frame your uncle?”
“Are you sleeping with Julian Vance now?”
I pushed through them, my bodyguards—provided by Alistair—clearing a path. I didn’t answer. I kept my head high, my face a mask of boredom.
The next few hours blurred together. I visited the Sterling family lawyer to publicly secure the few personal assets I had “left”—mostly my mother’s jewelry and some bonds. It was theater, of course. My real wealth, the billions in Oracle Holdings, remained invisible, but the world needed to see Skye Sterling scraping the bottom of the barrel.
C𝗼𝘮𝗽l𝗲𝘁e s𝘵𝘰𝗿𝗂𝘦𝘀 о𝘯 𝗯е𝘭𝗇оvеls.𝗰𝗈𝘮
Then I went to my temporary apartment and packed a single suitcase. Sweatpants. T-shirts. Underwear. Toiletries.
I picked up a framed photo from the nightstand. It was from years ago, before I married Liam. I looked so young. So soft. I took the photo out of the frame and tore it in half, then dropped it into the trash.
That girl was dead.
The next morning, at exactly 6:00 a.m., a black van with tinted windows pulled up. It wasn’t a limo. It was a transport van. The driver, a man with a neck thick as a tree trunk, held out a plastic bin.
“Phone,” he grunted.
I hesitated. My phone was my lifeline. It was how I tracked the markets, how I talked to Alistair.
“Hand it over,” the driver said. “You get this.”
He tossed me a cheap plastic flip phone. “Emergency calls only. No internet. No GPS. No camera.”
I dropped my smartphone into the bin. I felt a phantom vibration in my hand—the ghost of connection severed.
I climbed into the van. We drove for two hours, leaving the city skyline behind and heading into the wooded hills upstate. The scenery changed from concrete to green, but it didn’t feel peaceful. It felt isolating.