As her taillights disappeared down the drive, the victory he'd craved for a decade tasted like ash and blood.
Alistair stood alone in the grand foyer, the silence of the estate a physical weight crushing down on him. The cavernous space, once a testament to his power and lineage, now felt like a mausoleum. The echo of the heavy front door slamming shut still reverberated in the marrow of his bones. I'm leaving. Her words, so final, so absolute, had carved a void inside him more profound than any his father's suicide had left.
He had won.
He had drawn her in, seduced her, exposed her deepest vulnerabilities, and finally, shattered her with the truth. It was the flawless, brutal culmination of a ten-year blueprint. He had taken the girl whose testimony had broken his family and broken her in return.
So why did he feel like his own soul had been torn out?
He walked slowly to the window, his footsteps echoing in the oppressive quiet. The rain had started, a cold, relentless downpour that matched the desolation inside him. He could just make out the red pinpricks of her car's taillights as they wound down the long, dark drive toward the main road, toward freedom. Away from him.
His hand came up, pressing against the cold glass. The memory of her face — not in pain, not in fear, but in that cold, righteous fury — was branded behind his eyes. She had looked at him not as her tormentor, but as something pathetic. A coward. His father's son.
The truth of it was a poison in his veins.
He had known. God, he had always known. The note had been a brand, searing the truth into him the moment he'd found it. But the grief and the rage had been too vast, too all-consuming. He had needed a vessel for it, and Elara Vance, with her tragic eyes and her crumbling life, had been the perfect target. He had built his entire new identity — the self-made billionaire, the ruthless avenger — on the foundation of her destruction.
And now she was gone. The purpose that had fueled him for a decade had just driven away in a rental car, leaving him standing in a palace of ghosts with nothing but the echoing silence of his own hollow victory.
He was adrift. The compass of his hatred had shattered.
He let his forehead rest against the windowpane, the cold a feeble counterpoint to the fire of his shame. The image of her asleep in his arms, of her defiant kiss by the pool, of the way she had looked at him in the library — not with fear, but with a dawning, devastating pity — assaulted him. He had been so intent on breaking her, he hadn't noticed the ways she was remaking him, sanding down his sharp edges with her resilience, her quiet strength.
A sound ripped from his throat, a raw, guttural thing of pure anguish. It was the sound of a man realizing he had meticulously destroyed the only thing that had ever truly mattered.
His phone vibrated in his pocket, a jarring intrusion into his private hell. He ignored it. It buzzed again, more insistent. With a hand that trembled slightly, he pulled it out. Markus's name glowed on the screen.
He considered letting it go to voicemail, to sink back into his well-deserved misery. But a cold, sharp sliver of instinct, the same one that had built his empire, made him swipe to answer.
He didn't speak.
"Sir?" Markus's voice was urgent, clipped, cutting through the static of the rain and his own despair. "Sir, are you there?"
"What is it, Markus?" Alistair's voice was gravel, stripped of all emotion.
There was a beat of hesitation on the other end, a silence that spoke of bad news being measured and delivered. When Markus spoke again, his words were careful, precise, and they turned the ash in Alistair's mouth to ice.
"It's Elara, sir. Her car… it was forced off the road on the coastal route. It wasn't an accident."