Blake Morrison leaned forward in his chair and looked at Lily still curled in the corner of the cage with blood running down her arm and her whole body shaking like a leaf in a storm. His patience, what little he had brought with him tonight, was running out."Listen carefully, blind girl." His voice dropped to something quiet and cold. "If you don't crawl out of that cage right now and start doing what you were brought here to do, I can guarantee your ex-convict brother won't live to see tomorrow morning. I have people in every prison in this state. One phone call from me, and he'll be found hanging in his cell by lunch."The words hit Lily like a fist to the stomach.She could survive pain. She had survived pain her whole life. Hunger. Cold. Darkness. Loneliness. All of it. But the thought of Kevin dying because of her, because she refused to obey, because she was too weak to protect him the way he had always protected her, that thought was worse than any cage, any chain, any wound

The silence that followed Vivienne's slap was the kind of silence that fills a room like water filling a sinking ship, fast and total and impossible to breathe through.Olivia stood with her hand pressed against her cheek, staring at Vivienne with her mouth open and her eyes full of something that couldn't decide whether it was rage or disbelief. The red mark blooming across her face was already visible from across the room.Nobody moved.Nobody spoke.Kevin felt Vivienne's hand tighten gently on his arm, and he looked down at her profile, calm as still water, her eyes already sweeping the room with the detached efficiency of someone conducting an inspection. He understood what she was doing. He let her do it.Olivia found her voice first."Did you just hit me?" Her voice came out high and cracked at the edges. "Do you have any idea who I am? Do you know who this man is?" She pointed at Kevin, her finger shaking. "He just got out of prison this morning. He's my ex-husband. He's a nobo

Vivienne turned her head toward Kevin. The room was still holding its breath, every eye watching her, and she looked at him the way a person looks at the only steady thing in a tilting room."I'm removing Reed Enterprises from our partnership list permanently." Her voice was even and clean. "Do you have any objection to that?"Kevin looked at Olivia once. Just once. The woman who had thrown divorce papers at his feet that morning. The woman who had called his mother a bad smell and told him to drag her out before she died on the floor. The woman who had handed his blind sister to a stranger like a gift wrapped in cruelty."No objection." His voice was flat and final. "She treated my family the way she did. I have no reason left to protect anything of hers."Olivia's face went completely white.Not pale. White. The color of something that has had all the life pressed out of it. Her lips moved but nothing came out, and for the first time since she had stepped out of that car outside the

Olivia raised her head from the floor. Her hair was completely undone. Her white dress, the one that had cost more than Kevin's mother's medication, was smeared with something dark from the marble. Mascara had tracked two long lines down both cheeks.She looked up at Kevin standing above her and something moved behind her eyes. Not remorse. Not yet. Something rawer than that. The expression of a person who has just understood, for the first time and too late, that they threw away something they cannot get back."You loved me." Her voice was almost a whisper. "Three years ago, you loved me. You went to prison for me. You ruined your own life for me. And this is how you repay that? By humiliating me in front of everyone I know?"Kevin crouched down to her level.His eyes met hers from two feet away, and his face was calm in a way that was worse than anger, worse than cruelty, the calm of a man who has already finished grieving and moved past the wreckage."I went to prison for a woman w

While every eye in the hall stayed locked on Kevin, Damon slipped his phone out of his pocket and turned his body slightly, shielding the screen from view.His thumbs moved fast across the keys, typing out a short message to his father, explaining everything that had happened in a few clipped lines.He hit send and slid the phone back into his pocket.A slow, confident smile crept back onto his split lip, even as fresh blood cracked at the corner of his mouth.Harvard Company might carry weight in this city, but Damon was certain of one thing. His father would never let the Whitlock name be dragged through the mud like this without answering for it.A few minutes passed in tense silence, broken only by Olivia's quiet sniffling near the shattered doorway.Then heavy footsteps echoed from the hallway outside, slow and deliberate, growing louder with every step.Before anyone could ask what was happening, the grand doors were shoved open with a loud bang, the remaining hinges groaning un