Brooke POV
The drive back to the city blurred into a streak of neon lights and ancient ghosts.
My phone sat on the passenger seat, screen dark and silent. No apology text. No checking in to see if his wife had made it home safely through the rain. There was just the low hum of the engine and the crushing weight of five wasted years pressing down on my chest.
As I passed the industrial district, the scent of sulfur and wet wool assaulted me, cutting through even the filtered air of the luxury SUV.
It was the smell of my childhood. Acrid. Inescapable.
I remembered the day the foreman came to our peeling door, holding a settlement check in one hand and a non-disclosure agreement in the other. My mother sat at the kitchen table, her right hand a bandaged, bloody ruin, staring blankly at the wall.
The Spencer family paid well for silence.
That money bought us a small house away from the smog. It bought me a scholarship to the prep school where the children of the city's elite learned the fine arts of laundering money and destroying souls.
That was where I met them.
Ethan Spencer was the dark prince of the school-brooding, untouchable, and beautiful. And Kylie Holland was his designated queen.
I was the charity case. The girl whose clothes were always a season behind, whose mother had a hook for a hand. Kylie made sure the world never let me forget it. She would trip me in the corridors, spill lunch on my library books, and whisper that I smelled like factory smoke.
Ethan never joined in.
Once, in sophomore year, he found me crying in the locker room after Kylie had taken scissors to my gym uniform. He didn't speak. He just handed me his varsity jacket, heavy and warm, and stood guard at the door until I stopped shaking.
That single, small act of kindness became the seed of my destruction. I watered it with hope for years.
I became a narrative designer for the Spencer family's legitimate gaming front because I wanted to be useful to him. I wanted to show him I was more than just a charity case. I wrote stories where the hero always saved the girl.
God, what a joke.
I pulled the SUV into the underground garage of our penthouse building. The silence of the apartment was deafening when I walked in. It felt less like a home and more like a museum-cold, pristine, and dead.
I wandered into Ethan's study. It smelled of mahogany and the expensive cigars he smoked only when the stress of the Family became too much.
I sat in his leather chair, the material still holding the faint impression of his body.
I remembered our wedding day. It was supposed to be Ethan and Kylie. But she had run off with a club promoter two days before the ceremony-a massive, public insult to the Spencer name.
The Don, Ethan's father, was furious. He needed a wedding to secure a territory merger. He needed a bride who was docile, indebted, and clean.
He looked at me. The catering girl. The daughter of the woman they had maimed.
Ethan had proposed to me in the kitchen of the banquet hall, his face carved from stone.
Marry me, Brooke. Five years. We take care of your mother for life. You get five million when you leave. Just play the part.
I said yes because I loved him. I was foolish enough to think five years would be enough to make him love me back.
I pulled open the top drawer of his desk. There, hidden beneath a stack of merger files, sat a velvet box.
My heart stuttered. Had he remembered? Was this an anniversary gift he hadn't had a chance to give me tonight?
I opened it.
It was a diamond necklace. Heavy, gaudy, and utterly tasteless.
And there was a note.
"For K. I'll make it up to you."
The air left my lungs.
It wasn't for me. It was an apology gift for Kylie. He had bought it days ago. He had been planning to apologize to his mistress for the inconvenience of being married to me on our anniversary.
I snapped the box shut. The sound cracked like a gunshot in the quiet room.
The memory of six months ago clawed its way up from the depths of my mind. I had walked past this study and heard him talking to his Consigliere, Marcus.
"She's just a placeholder, Marcus. A cheap placeholder until Kylie gets her head out of her ass. She's convenient. She doesn't ask questions. She's nothing."
I had pretended I didn't hear it. I had cooked him dinner that night and asked about his day, swallowing the glass in my throat.
I stood up, the chair scraping violently against the floor.
The illusion was gone. The hope was dead. The girl who loved the boy who gave her a jacket was gone.
I walked to the closet in the hallway and pulled out a suitcase.
I wasn't going to wait for the five years to be up. I wasn't going to wait for him to discard me like a used pawn.
I was going to burn the contract to the ground.
