Chapter 227
A tear slid down Hilliard’s cheek. He didn’t wipe it away.
He sat there, pinned beneath the weight of his own failures. The anger he had felt toward her for hiding the children had dissolved completely. She hadn’t hidden them to hurt him. She had hidden them to save them — from him, from his world, from Charla. And she had been right.
“I hate him, Ash,” Cailin whispered. “I hate him so much it burns.”
“I know, sweetie.”
“But…” Cailin’s voice dropped so low that Hilliard had to ease back in his seat to catch it. “When he held me after the water — for just a second, I wasn’t afraid of the world. Only of him. And that terrifies me.”
Hilliard let out a slow, unsteady breath.
There was still an ember. Buried under five years of ash and pain, there was a small, stubborn spark.
He stood up.
He walked around the partition.
Ashley looked up, her eyes widening in alarm. She started to move, but Hilliard raised a hand.
“I’m not here to fight,” he said. His voice was stripped raw.
Cailin looked up. Her eyes were glassy and red-rimmed. She looked at him with a mixture of confusion and loathing.
“You,” she said.
“Me,” Hilliard said.
He didn’t say sorry. Sorry wasn’t enough — it was a word for stepping on someone’s toe, not for dismantling their life.
“We have a problem,” he said, the urgency in his voice cutting cleanly through her medicated haze.
At that moment, the lounge doors burst open. A man in a tailored suit strode in, waving a thick manila envelope. Cailin stiffened, recognizing the Holloway features immediately.
“They’re moving fast,” the man said, slightly out of breath, stopping beside Hilliard. He looked at Cailin and gave a quick, tight nod. “We haven’t officially met. I’m Vance Holloway — the family disappointment. Right now, we share a mutual enemy.”
“Vance?” Cailin blinked, trying to push through the fog. “What is going on?”
“My father, Preston, just hired the Dream Team — the legal sharks from hell,” Vance said, dropping the envelope on the table. “He’s backing Charla fully. They just filed a fifty-million-dollar civil suit against you for attempted murder.”
Cailin felt the floor tilt beneath her. “Fifty million?”
“It gets worse,” Vance said grimly. “They filed an emergency restraining order. You can’t leave the state of New York. They’ve flagged your passport. If you try to cross any border, you’ll be arrested on sight as a flight risk.”
“They want to trap me here,” Cailin whispered, her hand gripping the edge of the table. “They want to bleed me dry and lock me in a cage so they can take my children.”
“Take our children,” Hilliard said, his voice hardening into something cold and absolute. He looked at Cailin, and for the first time, she saw no conflict in his eyes — only a singular, unwavering focus. He had finally chosen a side.