Amira Osborne POV:
Someone in the small assembly of onlookers raised a telephone, its small lens a malevolent, glittering eye. The humiliation was a physical pressure, a great weight upon my chest that stole the very air from my lungs. My nails dug into my palms, the sharp sting a welcome anchor in the rising tide of mortification.
I turned to go back to my mother’s empty apartment, anywhere but here. I twisted the doorknob. It was locked.
He had locked me out.
I pounded on the door, my voice raw. “Carter, let me in! What are you doing?”
His voice came from the other side, cold and distant. “Not until you apologize. Get upon your knees and tell Francine you are sorry for upsetting her.”
The neighbors snickered. I stood there in the drafty hallway, shivering in my thin funeral dress, stripped of my home, my dignity, my last shred of self-worth.
Finally, defeated, I sank to my knees. The cold of the tile seeped through the thin fabric as I bowed my head in feigned repentance.
The door clicked open. Carter stood there, holding his suit jacket. He draped it over my shoulders in a gesture that might have once seemed tender.
But the jacket was redolent of her. That cloying, expensive perfume of gardenia and musk, mingled with the scent of his skin. It was the very odor of my betrayal.
Francine appeared behind him. She did not smile, but a low, satisfied hum escaped her throat, and she reached out, not to comfort him, but to straighten the lapel of his coat, a small, proprietary gesture of ownership. “Oh, that is my jacket, darling,” she purred. “Carter let me borrow it earlier. My feet were so cold.”
My stomach heaved. I tore the jacket from my shoulders and threw it upon the floor as if it were on fire.
“I shall sleep in the study,” I said, my voice flat and devoid of all emotion. I pushed past them without another glance.
Carter frowned, a flicker of unease in his eyes. But then his telephone pinged with a calendar notification: “Wedding Day - 2 Days.” The anxiety on his face smoothed away, replaced by his usual arrogance. He thought he still had me. He thought I was merely throwing a tantrum, that I would never abandon him, not with our wedding so close. He believed I had nowhere else to go.
He was wrong.
In the study, I opened my laptop. An email glowed on the screen. “Security Clearance: APPROVED. Welcome to the Chimera Project.”
Tears of relief, of gratitude, of a pure, unalloyed sense of deliverance streamed down my face. My telephone rang. It was Arjun. “Your flight is booked, Amira. Day after tomorrow. Seven o’clock in the morning. Sharp.”
I looked around the study, the room where I had spent innumerable nights laboring over Carter’s business proposals instead of my own research. My eyes fell upon a pair of small clay figurines on the bookshelf—ones we had fashioned on our first anniversary. He had promised then that we would always be a shield to one another.
Without a second’s hesitation, I swept them from the shelf. They made a dull, unsatisfying thud as they landed in the wastepaper basket.
Then, I booked my ticket.
