Sera's POV
Julian's eyes burned with a barely contained violence, the red mark of my handprint standing out like a brand against his pale skin.
He raised his hand, his fist clenching as he pulled his arm back to strike me.
Before the blow could land, a heavy hand clamped down on Julian's wrist.
Dante, my personal enforcer, had materialized from the shadows of the doorway. His grip on Julian's arm was like a band of solid steel.
"Calm down, Consigliere," Dante growled, his voice a low, threatening vibration in the air.
A few other loyal soldiers had gathered in the hall, murmuring among themselves. Their eyes darted from Julian's raised fist to the tiny, bruised body on the metal table.
"The little girl's bones were shattered by the cartel," one of the older soldiers muttered, his voice pitched just loud enough for Julian to hear. "It is unnatural for a father to feel no sorrow while attacking a grieving mother."
Julian yanked his arm out of Dante's grip, glaring at me, his chest rising and falling in ragged breaths.
A sharp, generic ringtone cut through the tension. It was Julian's burner phone.
He pulled it from his pocket, and the moment he looked at the screen, the murderous fury on his face vanished. His features softened into something nauseatingly tender.
He answered the call and turned his back to me.
Chloe's panicked, high-pitched voice echoed from the tiny speaker, stark in the dead quiet of the room.
"Julian, please, you have to come back to the bunker. I tried to handle the decrypted file like you taught me, but it's a mess. The system is locking me out. I'm so scared I ruined it."
"Don't panic, sweetheart," Julian murmured, his voice a soothing caress. "I'm on my way. I'll fix it. Just step away from the terminal."
He hung up the phone and slipped it back into his pocket. He turned to leave, his movements abrupt and urgent.
"Stop causing trouble for the family, Sera," he warned, refusing to meet my eyes. "We will talk about your behavior later."
He walked out through the heavy metal doors. He did not look back at the steel bier holding his child, and he did not look back at me.
I remained perfectly still. I pressed my nails so deeply into my palms that the skin broke, allowing warm blood to well in the creases. The sharp, physical sting was the only thing that kept my thoughts from splintering.
The passage of time became a hollow ache. When I walked out of the mortuary an hour later, the attendant had promised to handle the cremation with the utmost care.
I sat in the back of my armored SUV, pulled out my backup phone, and opened the secure network.
Chloe had deleted the photo of their hands.
In its place was a new post—a picture of a greasy burger and a cheap beer on a sticky wooden table.
The caption read: "He drove me all the way out of the city limits to this dive bar just to calm my nerves. He says cheap food tastes better when the company is right." There was a red heart emoji at the end.
A wave of pure, physical revulsion rose in the back of my throat. I leaned over and dry-heaved into the leather footwell.
Julian was a man of impeccably refined tastes; he wore custom suits, drank aged scotch, and detested anything unpolished. Now, he was lowering his standards, sitting in a filthy roadside bar, just to play the hero for an incompetent girl.
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. The last thread of illusion I held for my marriage snapped in that moment.
I picked up my phone and dialed the head of my financial division.
As the heiress to the Moretti empire, I controlled the massive laundering fronts and the illicit funding pipelines. Julian's entire intelligence network ran on my money.
"Initiate an immediate withdrawal of all Moretti funds from Julian's intelligence division," I ordered. My voice was steady, as if it belonged to someone else. "Suspend the God's Ear surveillance project. Freeze every account linked to his operations."
"Consider it done, Boss," the manager replied respectfully.
I sat in the crematorium's waiting room for three hours, the silence broken only by the hum of the ventilation system. My eyes were fixed on the sterile white walls until the attendant finally handed a heavy marble urn into my arms. When I arrived at the penthouse, the marble urn felt like a block of ice in my arms.
I walked into the massive living room and placed the urn on top of her favorite grand piano. I surrounded the cold, white stone with her plush toys—the little stuffed rabbit with the missing button eye, and the velvet bear Julian had bought her for her third birthday.
I walked down the hall and entered her bedroom, where the air still smelled like baby shampoo and lavender.
I crawled into her small bed and curled into a ball, pressing my face into her pink sheets. The phantom sensation of her soft cheek brushing against mine haunted the empty room.
Exhaustion and overwhelming grief dragged me down into a dark, airless sleep.
I dreamed of her. She was wearing her favorite princess dress, the one with the ridiculous amount of tulle, and she was running toward me across the estate gardens, laughing.
"Mommy, I missed you!" she called out.
I dropped to my knees and caught her in my arms. I held her tightly, weeping into her hair, so relieved that my baby was safe.
Suddenly, the warmth in her body vanished. Her small hands gripped my clothes with terrifying strength, and her sweet smile twisted into a mask of stark terror.
Blood poured from her mouth. She screamed in agonizing despair, the sound tearing through my eardrums.
I woke up screaming, my lungs burning for air.
And found Julian standing over me in the darkness.
