Chapter 175

[ 1,000 words ]

Delia’s POV

I gasped. He leaned in closer, his lips hovering just inches from my ear. “Do you want to know a secret? Every time I have to look at you, I’m actually picturing her. When you were on the floor the other night, I wasn’t disgusted because of what you were doing. I was disgusted because you were the wrong sister doing it. If it were Katia, I wouldn’t have walked past. I would have broken her against that marble, filled her completely and left her sated p>

I felt like I was suffocating. The cruelty was so precise, so calculated to destroy every ounce of self-worth I had left.

“Now,” he said, pulling back and looking at me with that cold, dead stare again. “Go back to your room. Put on one of those expensive masks you like so much and stay out of my sight. If I see you on this wing again, I’ll have the locks changed on your suite, and you can see how much Victor Hale likes a homeless socialite p>

“You… you’re a monster,” I whispered, the tears finally breaking.

“No, Delia,” Julian said, stepping back into the shadows of his study. “I’m just a man who knows what he wants. And I don’t want you. I never will. If you’re lucky, I’ll let you keep the Kensington name when I’m done with you. If you’re not… well, I hear the guards are getting lonely p>

He shut the door. The click of the lock was the final punctuation mark on my humiliation.

I stood in the hallway, my chest heaving; the image of his smile at the mention of Katia burned into my retinas. He wanted her. He wanted the “spicy” mother, the rebel, the sister who had supposedly ruined our family.

I wiped my face with a trembling hand, the grief hardening into a cold, black diamond of resolve. He thought I was a chore? He thought I was just an invoice?

“You want her so badly, Julian?” I whispered to the closed door. “Fine. You can have her. But I’m going to make sure that by the time you get her, she’s so broken and disgraced that even you won’t be able to stomach the sight of her p>

He had called me a whore. He had called me repulsive. He had told me to go fuck his guards.

I turned and walked away from the study, my heels no longer clicking. I walked like a predator now. Julian Windsor had no idea that by trying to crush me, he had finally given me the one thing he said I lacked.

He had given me fire. And I was going to use it to burn every bridge that led to my sister.

I didn’t go back to my room. I went to the small, hidden bar in the other library and poured myself a drink—something strong, something that burned. As the liquid hit my stomach, I pulled out my phone.

I had work to do. And if Julian thought the “spicier” woman was the one with the child, he was about to find out just how bitter the “perfect” one could be when she was pushed too far.

Katia’s POV

I drove myself home. I didn’t take Aiden with me. Just the car and the city and forty minutes of silence that I needed more than I had needed anything in a long time.

I had said things at that lunch that I had not said to anyone except Samantha. Things I had been carrying for six years in the sealed compartment I kept for information too heavy to leave anywhere accessible. The Vegas night. The marriage certificate. Jules. The ring in the box by my bed that I had never been able to explain or get rid of or stop thinking about.

I had said all of it out loud. To Grandma Celeste Windsor.

Who had listened without judgement, without drama, and had then covered my hand with hers and told me not to worry. That she would help me find my husband.

I had believed her.

That was the part I was still sitting with as I drove. Not what I had confessed. Not the relief of having said it — though there was relief, more than I expected. What I was sitting with was the fact that I had believed her completely and immediately. Without question. Without the usual wall I put between myself and people who offered to help with things I had been managing alone.

I trusted Grandma Celeste.

I pulled into the underground car park below my building. Turned the engine off and sat inside my car.

The car park was quiet. Fluorescent light. The distant sound of the city existing above me.

I thought about Aiden at the Windsor estate; he was content and comfortable and calling her Gigi after forty minutes as if he had always had a Gigi. He adapted to things the way water adapted to containers. I had watched him do it his whole life, and it still undid me sometimes.

I thought about Julian. I didn’t know what I was doing with him; he was my sister’s husband, but God, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want him to fully fuck me. I liked him, but I was still married at the end of the day.

That was the part I had not said out loud at the lunch. The part that sat beneath everything else like something I had not yet found language for. Grandma had asked about Jules, and I had talked about Jules as a stranger — a man with no face and no surname and no context except one night six years ago. I had talked about him the way I had been talking about him for six years, which was carefully and at a distance.

What I had not said was that somewhere in the last year the distance had been getting harder to maintain.

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