The morning after her humiliation bled into the day with a strange, uneasy quiet—like the world had drawn in a deep breath and refused to let it go.
Seraphina Moretti did not come down from her room for hours. She paced. She stared at walls. She clutched her scarf—the cursed, incriminating scrap of silk he had returned to her as if handling evidence—and she pressed it to her face as if she could smother the memory of what she had done. But the memory clung like smoke, filling every corner of her mind, every inhale, every pulse.
She kept seeing him again and again.
Not the old Adrian—the ridiculous, overeager, clingy boy who lived for alcohol, greasy meals, and her attention. No. He no longer existed in any shape the world had known.
Instead she saw the man who had replaced him: the cold, precise, unreadable chairman who didn't raise his voice because he didn't need to. The one who moved with a kind of detached fatalism, a quiet gravity that pressed down on the room whenever he entered.
She remembered the way his eyes had lifted to her across the breakfast table—not irritated, not surprised, not even angry.
Simply aware.
Aware and done.
It was that, more than anything, that rotted inside her chest.
And while she drowned in the swamp of her spiraling thoughts, he—Adrian Harrington—was already gone, leaving before 7 a.m., already at work by the time the sun fully woke over the city skyline.
The Harrington Group headquarters loomed like an empire carved in steel—fortress, cathedral, throne. Once, employees whispered about the heir's incompetence, about how the company would crumble the moment Atlas Harrington passed the torch.
Now they didn't whisper.They trembled.
Because the heir who walked into the boardroom was not the boy they remembered. He was lean, sharp, carved down to the bone by grief and iron discipline. His face held a stillness so exacting it pushed the entire executive floor into fearful silence.
He arrived without an entourage.Without guards.Without even a secretary trailing behind him.
He carried only a tablet, a pen, and the weight of an empire.
The doors opened for him automatically.
"Good morning, Chairman Harrington," the executives chorused, almost in unison.
He didn't acknowledge the greeting.
His gaze swept the room—cold, cutting—before he took his place at the head of the table. No one sat until he did. No one breathed too loudly until his eyes dropped to the first report.
And when he spoke—clear, quiet, merciless—the entire room leaned forward as if the air itself strained to hear him.
He dismantled proposals with surgical precision.He ordered restructurings without hesitation.He questioned figures with the sharpness of a man who had not slept for peace in months.
Employees once joked about the Harrington heir.Now they feared him more than they ever feared his father.
Because Adrian had nothing to lose now.And a man with nothing left was the most dangerous creature in the corporate wild.
Halfway into the morning meeting, he paused—not because he was tired (he never allowed himself to be tired), but because a thought surfaced uninvited, unwelcome:
She's going to do something stupid again.
Of course she would. Seraphina Moretti had never once done what she was told in her life—not at school, not in social circles, not in their engagement. She was stubbornness incarnate, a creature driven by pride and impulse. Someone who believed the world would adjust around her whims.
But he was no longer a whim.He was a boundary.
A boundary she had crossed yesterday.
A boundary she would cross again.
He reached into his inner jacket pocket and pulled out a sealed black envelope.
The annulment filing.
Already signed by him. Already validated. Already sent to the government two days ago.
He slid a pen across the table, made a quick correction on one of the supporting documents, and handed it to his chief legal officer.
"Have the Ministry expedite," he said. "Priority clearance."
A beat.
"Immediately."
His tone left no room for hesitation.
He wasn't doing it in anger.He wasn't doing it out of spite.
He was doing it for one reason: she was interfering with his penance. Every wasted breath, every disrupted schedule, every ounce of distraction took time away from the only thing he had left—his obligation to his parents, to the company, to the empire his father built with blood.
Adrian could destroy himself.He would not let her destroy his work.
Not again.
While he sharpened the world to his will, Seraphina sat curled on the divan of her guest room with her knees pulled up, feeling her dignity unravel thread by thread. Hours passed, and she could not escape her own mind. It gnawed at her, hunted her, dragged her through memory after memory until her chest felt full of stones.
Why did I hide? Why did I do that?She had no answer.
Only the echo of her humiliation.
Only the image of his body—ruined and rebuilt through pain, discipline, and self-loathing sculpted into something impossible to stare at without feeling the heat climb up her neck.
Only the cold finality of his voice when he returned her scarf.
Do not test my patience again.
He didn't shout. He didn't scold. He didn't even look annoyed.
He simply dismissed her existence, erased her from the moment the words left his mouth.
That was what she could not bear.
Because once, she had been the center of his world.Once, he had revolved around her orbit, pathetic and doting and irritating.
Now she wasn't even a stray star in his sky.
She laughed—sharp, bitter.
"How did my life fall apart this fast…? How did his change so much…?"
She clawed at her scalp.
She hadn't come home because she cared.
She had come because her parents ordered her.Because he was richer than every royal family combined.Because clinging to him would save her future whether she loved him or not.
She had been cruel when the news broke of his parents dying—she remembered that now with a sick twist in her gut. She had muttered, "Serves him right," when she thought he'd perish too. She had believed the company would crumble without Atlas Harrington's genius and Adrian's incompetence.
And now she was the fool.
Because he didn't crumble.
He rose.
He rose so high she couldn't even see the edges of him anymore.
Seraphina pressed her palms to her face and groaned.
"He's going to cancel it," she whispered. "He's going to really cancel it…"
Her parents' voices echoed in her head—harsh, cold, greedy.
You idiot girl. Do you realize what you're losing? He's the most influential man in the world now. Do NOT let him annul it. Do you understand?
For the first time in her life, she felt something she had never tasted before:
Fear.
Terrifying, bitter fear.
Fear not of losing him—
—but of becoming nothing in his eyes.
She stood abruptly, heart pounding, breath shaking.
She had to go to him.
She had to cling, grasp, plead, crawl—whatever it took—before he erased her from his life entirely.
She rushed to her door—
Only to see a staff member quietly leave a small silver tray outside her room.
She frowned.
A letter.
Neat, immaculate handwriting marked her name.
She opened it with trembling fingers.
Her eyes darted over the page.
In two crisp lines, written in Adrian's stark, decisive hand:
"Do not wait for me.I will return late tonight.Do not disturb my study again."
No greeting.No signature.No warmth.No anger.
Just boundaries.
Clarity.
Indifference.
Her breath trembled, and she pressed a hand to her mouth.
He wasn't even here, and still he pushed her away as effortlessly as exhaling.
She could feel it—something inside her cracking, splintering under the weight of humiliation, desperation, and a dawning realization:
She was losing him.No—she had already lost him.
And Adrian, far away at his headquarters, did not think of her once as he reshaped the world to his will.
The annulment process had begun.
And Seraphina Moretti was running out of time.