Kasim
The storm doesn't stop when the boardroom empties. It follows me, a living entity feeding on the chaos she left in her wake. The elevator ride to my penthouse is a silent ascent into a different kind of prison. The doors slide open not onto peace, but onto a battlefield of memory.
By the time I cross the threshold, lightning fractures the sky, and the city below is painted in stark, white fire. I loosen my tie, but it feels like a noose. Every step I take across the cold marble floor echoes with the her silence. The air in my office, usually a sanctuary of control, is now thick, charged with the lingering scent of her perfume—a faint, cruel whisper of jasmine that I can't purge from the air, or my mind.
Seven years, and she still knows how to bleed me without touching me.
I drop into my chair, the leather groaning under my weight as if sharing my burden. I stare at the skyline I conquered. Crowcrest gleams below, a city that now bows to my empire, to my name. I devoured it piece by piece, swallowing businesses and breaking rivals until the Crown itself had no choice but to sit at my table. I built this tower so high that even the Owden palace looks small, insignificant beneath it. It was all for this. To stand above them. To prove my worth in the only language they understand: power.
And yet tonight, for the first time in years, standing at the pinnacle of everything I've wrought, I feel powerless.
Because she walked back into my world as if she'd never left it. Untouched. Untarnished. Her composure a fortress I couldn't breach. She looked at me, and it was as if I were just another obstacle. A business rival. Not the man whose soul she once held in her hands.
Like I meant nothing.
A memory, sharp as a shard of glass, stabbed through the constructed walls around my mind.
The air at the Crestwood Polo Club was thick with the scent of crushed grass, horse sweat, and the quiet arrogance of old money. My family was there as guests—wealthy, sure, but our name was written in ledgers, not on royal decrees. We were "new money," a label whispered like a curse in those hallowed stables. I was checking my father's new investment, a spirited chestnut mare, when I saw her.
Eldora wasn't on the sidelines sipping champagne. She was in the center of the training arena, a vision of focused power astride a storm-grey stallion. She moved with the horse as one entity, her body speaking a language of subtle shifts and unshakable confidence. She was the only person in the place who didn't seem to be performing.
Later, I found her alone, brushing the stallion down with a fierce, tender focus. A smudge of dirt was on her cheek. She looked up, her storm-grey eyes meeting mine without a trace of the judgment I was used to in that circle.
"You're the Marlowe heir," she'd said, not as a question. Her voice was straightforward, cutting through the pretense. "Your father bought the Firecracker mare. She's too much horse for any of the boys here. But you could handle her. You ride like you're trying to conquer the world, not partner with it."
It was the truest thing anyone had ever said to me. I was always trying to conquer something. She handed me the brush. "Here. He likes it firm, just behind the withers."
Our fingers brushed. And in that simple, dusty stable, far from the watching eyes of her family, the princess who had everything saw the ambition in the "new money" heir and didn't scorn it—she challenged it. I fell in love with her there, surrounded by the quiet sounds of contented animals, in the one place where titles faded and character was all that mattered.
The phantom scent of hay and leather vanished. The memory of her touch was replaced by the cold, smooth surface of my desk. The ghost of that fragile connection, that was built on mutual recognition rather than status, echoed in the silence—a haunting testament to what we had seen in each other before it was torn apart.
A sound rips from my throat, half-growl, half-agony. I rake a hand through my hair, the carefully constructed mask of the untouchable CEO crumbling in the solitude of my own domain, anger is clawing at my chest. Years ago, I tore through the world searching for her. I hunted her ghost through cities and shadows, spending fortunes, burning bridges, until my soul simply broke under the weight of her silence. She vanished without a trace, and when the silence finally broke, it was with a truth so shattering I thought it would kill me.
But it didn't.
It turned me into this.
The man who will never again kneel.
The man who will watch the Crown beg for scraps from his table.
And yet… one look from her across that boardroom, one fleeting glimpse of the storm-grey eyes that once looked at me with love, and I was seventeen again—raw, bleeding, foolishly hopeful and utterly destroyed.
No.
I slam my palm against the desk, the sharp crack echoing off the glass walls like a gunshot. The pain is a clean, sharp anchor. That boy is dead. She killed him.
If Eldora wants to play the phantom princess, the angel with glass skin and a heart of ice, then I'll be the tempest. I'll strip her piece by piece, layer by layer, until the mask shatters and the world sees the truth she's hiding.
I'll make her confess why she left me.
I'll make her choke on the lies she fed me with her silence.
Only then, when she is as broken and laid bare as I was, will I decide if she deserves mercy.
I lean back, inhaling slowly, forcing the fire in my veins to turn to ice. Control. Always control. She will not see me broken. She will not see me bleed. Not again.
The phone on my desk buzzes, shattering the heavy silence. Jameson's calm, efficient voice fills the speaker. "The Crowcrest council requests a follow-up meeting later this week. Princess Eldora will be present again."
Of course she will. The phantom does not retreat after a single skirmish.
"Set it," I say. My voice is smooth, cold, a sharpened blade, though the storm inside me surges against its confines. "And Jameson—"
"Yes, sir?"
"Dig into her. Everything from the past seven years. I don't care how deep you have to go, what tombs you have to rob. I want to know every secret she thinks she's buried. Every breath she took while I was choking on her silence."
A pause, then a simple, "Understood."
The line goes dead.
I stand, pacing the length of the office like a caged tiger. The city sprawls beneath me like prey under a hawk's shadow. My reflection glares back at me from the dark glass—a man of hard lines and sharper eyes, the perfect, impenetrable mask I crafted for survival. But tonight, I see the fissures. Inside that mask, there's still a boy, bloody and broken, clawing at the walls, screaming a single, unanswered question into the void.
Why did you leave me, Eldora?
Why without a word?
If she thought time would heal me, if she believed distance would douse the flames, she underestimated the depth of my obsession. I don't forgive. I don't forget. I consume.
And with her back in my world, I will not stop. I will not rest. I will tear the truth from her lips, even if I have to shatter us both in the process.
I pour myself a drink, the amber liquid catching the lightning outside. I down it in one burning swallow, the fire a welcome echo of the one in my soul. The storm rages louder, thunder shaking the glass walls. I welcome it. Let the world burn with me.