Vivienne's POV
"You're a whore, Vivienne. Everyone in this building knows it."
The words hit me like a slap in the middle of my own office.
I didn't flinch. I've learned not to.
Delilah stood in my doorway, beautiful and poisonous in the way only she could be, surrounded by six senior executives who had the nerve to look anywhere but at me. She smiled like she'd just said something perfectly reasonable. Like she hadn't just called me what she called me, out loud, in front of people who'd known me since I was a teenager.
I set down my pen very slowly.
"Delilah," I said. Calm. Always calm. Calm was the only armor I had left.
"We need this office," she announced, sweeping her arm around the tiny room like she was presenting a grand estate. "For storage. We've been needing extra space for months, and honestly—" she tilted her head, eyes glittering, "—you don't actually use it. You don't actually work here."
One of the executives—Mr. Huang, who used to bring me lollipops when I was ten years old and visiting my father's office—pressed his lips together and stared at the floor.
Nobody spoke.
"I work here," I said quietly.
"You sit here," Delilah corrected, her voice turning sweet as poison candy. "You collect a paycheck that this company can't afford, and you take up space that real employees could use." She paused, letting the silence stretch long and ugly. "Besides—how long are you going to keep this up, Vivi? Playing the devoted wife to a dead man walking?"
A few of the executives shifted uncomfortably.
"He hasn't died yet," I said.
"No?" Delilah's smile widened. "That's shocking. Five years and he's still breathing? Honestly, at this point, I think even he's bored of keeping you trapped." She turned to the executives with a little laugh, like we were sharing a joke. "She married a billionaire who was supposed to die in six months. The man refused to cooperate."
Someone laughed. A small, nervous sound, but a laugh.
Something inside my chest cracked. Quietly. Like ice breaking at the edges where no one can see.
"I'll pack my things," I said.
I stood up. I began putting my folders into my bag. My hands didn't shake—I made sure of that. I had spent five years making sure my hands didn't shake in front of these people.
But Delilah wasn't done.
She never was.
"Oh, and Vivienne?" She waited until I looked at her. Until everyone was watching. "Those proposals you submitted last quarter? The media partnership ones you're so proud of?" She smiled. "I didn't reject them because they were bad. I rejected them because watching you try—" she laughed softly, "—is my favorite thing about Mondays."
The room went completely still.
I looked at her. Really looked at her, maybe for the first time in a long time. At the cruelty living so comfortably behind her pretty face. At the pleasure she took in this. In me.
I picked up my bag.
"Enjoy the storage space," I said, and I walked out.
I made it to my car before the shaking started.
I sat in the parking lot and pressed my forehead against the steering wheel and let myself fall apart for exactly eight minutes. I know because I watched the clock. Eight minutes of silent crying, hands gripping the wheel so hard my knuckles went white.
Then I straightened up. Wiped my face. Fixed my eyes in the rearview mirror.
You're fine. You're fine. You are fine.
My father was dead. He'd died two years ago thinking I was happy in my marriage, thinking his sacrifice had meant something, thinking his family was safe.
He died believing a lie I told him with a smile on my face.
At least one of us got to die in peace.
I drove without thinking, letting the city blur past the windows, and eventually I found myself at the waterfront. The water was dark and flat in the early evening, barely moving. I stared at it for a long time.
Five years.
I was twenty-two when Helena came to me with her solution—a dying billionaire who needed a wife for his final months. Temporary, she said. He's already dying. Six months, maybe a year, then you'll inherit and we'll be saved.
Your father won't lose everything. Don't you love your father?
So I signed the contract. I married Dante Hawthorne, a pale, quiet man who could barely lift his head from his pillow, and I moved into his estate with its nurses and its medications and its silence.
He was supposed to die.
He didn't.
Now I'm twenty-seven years old and I have no salary, no shares, no home of my own, no freedom, and a husband who is somehow still, impossibly, alive.
My phone buzzed. Aria.
Where are you? I've been calling. I heard what Delilah did. VIV, PLEASE ANSWER.
I turned the phone face-down on the seat.
I couldn't talk right now. I couldn't perform I'm fine for anyone, not even her.
By the time I finally drove toward the Hawthorne Estate, the sky had gone black.
I kept thinking about Delilah's face. The way she smiled when she said whore. Like the word was a gift she was giving me. Like she'd been saving it.
He's still breathing. That's shocking.
I pulled up to the estate gates and sat there for a moment. The building loomed ahead—beautiful and cold, exactly like the life inside it. I had a dinner to attend. Weekly dinner with my husband, the man I'd given five years of my life to, the man I barely knew, the man who sat across from me twice a week with his blankets and his nurses and his hollow eyes and asked me how was your day in that thin, tired voice.
Fine, I always said. Everything's fine.
I put the car in park and pressed my hands over my face.
Just get through the dinner. Just get through tonight.
I reached over to grab my phone and check the time—
And my hand stopped.
There was a news notification on the screen. The headline was short. Three words.
HEIRESS FOUND DEAD.
My heart stuttered. I unlocked the phone with shaking fingers.
Delilah Crane, 27, COO of Ashford Holdings, was found murdered in her apartment this evening. Police describe the crime scene as 'professional and precise.' Sources within the department believe it may be connected to the Ghost—the city's most feared and unidentified criminal, responsible for at least eleven confirmed assassinations in the past—
My phone slipped out of my hand.
Delilah.
Delilah, who had called me a whore six hours ago in front of a room full of people.
Delilah, who had smiled like she owned me.
Dead.
My lungs forgot how to work. I sat there, frozen, in my car in front of the estate, staring at the phone on the floor of my car.
The Ghost.
Everyone in Ashford City knew the name. Nobody knew the face. A shadow. A rumor. A name people said in whispers.
And Delilah had made me her enemy this morning.
By tonight, she was gone.
My eyes drifted slowly, against my will, toward the warm lit windows of the Hawthorne Estate.
Something cold crawled up my spine.
Dante, I thought.
And then, before I could stop it, the thought that followed—quiet, terrible, impossible:
It was him.