After Prison, I Became the Apex of the Stars

CHAPTER 2

Three years he had rotted in a cell for a crime he didn't commit, and this was his welcome home, a clipboard and a pen and a cousin who looked at him like he was an insect she wanted to step on.

"Arya can't even face me herself, she sent her cousin to end our marriage in a parking lot?"

The rear door opened, and Arya stepped out with the kind of grace that made the air around her seem to rearrange itself. Tailored dress, hair pinned back, the posture of a woman who had spent three years learning how to carry authority in her spine. 

She was beautiful the way a blade is beautiful, and Eddard hated that he noticed it even now, even with the divorce papers still warm in Martha's hands.

But her eyes wouldn't stay on his, and that told him everything the paperwork hadn't.

"Eddard, this isn't a joke," Arya said in a voice that was careful and measured and practiced, like she'd rehearsed this conversation in a mirror until all the guilt was smoothed out of it. "I need you to understand that I didn't come to this decision lightly."

"Then explain it to me, Arya, because I'm having trouble understanding why my wife is handing me divorce papers thirty seconds after I walk out of prison."

"We're not the same people anymore, and my company is about to go public next month. If the board of directors discovers that my husband is a convicted criminal, the entire IPO collapses. Everything I've spent three years building, gone, because of a scandal I can't control."

Eddard laughed, and the sound that came out of him was so hollow it surprised even himself. "Everything you built. That's funny, Arya, that's really funny, because if you had any idea what's been happening behind the scenes of those deals you're so proud of, you'd choke on those words."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"It means your company would be a pile of bankruptcy filings and bad press right now if it weren't for things you can't even begin to imagine, but go ahead, tell me more about what you built all by yourself while I was sitting in a cell for your family."

Something flickered across her face, a crack in the composure she'd spent the whole drive building up, but she filled it in quickly and pressed forward like a woman who had already decided which direction she was walking and refused to stop.

 "I want to be fair about this. I'm offering you ten million dollars and the villa, our home, and you could live comfortably for the rest of your life without ever worrying about money again."

"The villa." Eddard repeated the word slowly, letting it sit in his mouth like something spoiled.

 "You mean the house my parents left to me before I ever knew your name? The house that has been legally mine since the day they died? That's your generous compensation, Arya, giving me back my own property and acting like you're doing me a favor?"

Arya opened her mouth, but nothing came out because there was nothing to say that wouldn't prove his point.

Martha stepped into the silence like she'd been waiting for exactly this opening, her arms crossed, her chin lifted, her entire body radiating the kind of contempt that comes from someone who has never once questioned whether they belong at the top of the food chain.

"Oh, save the self-righteous act, Eddard, it doesn't suit you and it never did. You should be on your knees thanking Arya for offering you a single cent, because let me tell you what the world sees when it looks at you." She took a step closer. 

"They see a cockroach crawling out of a prison cell, blinking at the sun like it forgot what daylight looks like. You went in as nothing and you came out as less than nothing, and the fact that you're standing here acting like you deserve better is genuinely embarrassing for everyone involved."

"Martha, that's enough," Arya murmured, but she didn't move to stop her, and that silence was its own kind of answer.

"No, he needs to hear this because apparently nobody has told him the truth in three years." Martha's lip curled as she looked Eddard up and down with the slow, thorough disgust of someone inspecting something they'd scraped off the bottom of their shoe.

 "Do you know how many men want Arya now? Real men, Eddard, men with actual money and actual power and actual futures who know how to build empires instead of rotting in prison cells like parasites. Fred Gordon has been courting her for months, the Fred Gordon, heir to the Gordon family, Second biggest name in this entire city, and he has brought Arya more support and more deals in six months than you brought her in your entire pathetic, insect-level excuse for a marriage."

The name Fred settled in Eddard's chest like a stone dropped into still water, and the ripples spread outward through his ribs until they reached something cold and final at the center of him.

"You're a snake that slithered into a garden it never belonged in," Martha continued, savoring every word like it was expensive chocolate melting on her tongue. "A bottom-feeding, worthless, spineless snake, and now the gardener is finally pulling you out by the tail and throwing you over the fence where you belong. So do everyone a favor and sign the paper and crawl back to whatever hole produced you."

Eddard said nothing for a lonG moment, and the silence stretched between the three of them like a wire pulled taut enough to hum. Then he turned to Arya, and when he spoke his voice came out quiet and steady in a way that made both women go completely still, the way animals go still when they sense something shifting in the ground beneath them.

"A criminal. You're calling me a criminal. Do you remember why I'm a criminal, Arya? Do you remember what happened in our living room three years ago, when your mother grabbed my hands with tears streaming down her face and your father put his forehead on the floor like a man begging God for mercy?" He watched her face and saw the color draining out of it in real time, like someone pulling a plug somewhere beneath her skin. "And you, you looked at me with those eyes, those exact same eyes you're looking at me with right now, and you begged me to take the blame for your brother. He was drunk. He nearly killed someone with his car. And I went to prison for him, for three years, because you knelt on the floor of our living room and told me you would love me forever if I saved your family."

Arya's lips pressed together so hard they went white, and for one second, just one, the guilt broke through everything she'd built over it and sat there naked and trembling on her features before she gathered herself and covered it again like a woman closing curtains against a storm.

"I will always be grateful for what you did," she said quietly, and she almost meant it. "But this is about the future now, Eddard, both of our futures, and staying married to each other helps neither one of us. Signing this is the best thing for both of us."

Eddard looked at the woman he had loved for five years, the woman he had thrown away three years of his life for, and he searched her face for something, anything, a trace of the girl who once told him she would wait forever. She wasn't there. Maybe she never had been.

"Give me the pen."

Martha handed it over with a smirk that stretched across her face like a wound opening.

Eddard took the check for ten million dollars between two fingers and tore it in half, then tore those halves into quarters, and the pieces drifted to the asphalt between them while Martha's smirk fell apart into something confused and startled, like she'd swung at something and missed. He pressed the pen to the divorce agreement, found the signature line at the bottom of the page, and wrote his name in one clean stroke that didn't waver.

Then he placed the clipboard on the hood of the car, turned his back on both of them, and walked down the road with nothing but a bag over his shoulder and a silver ring on his finger that could move the world.

Behind him, the pieces of the check caught the wind and scattered across the parking lot like dead leaves.