The cold air was a slap. It didn’t wake her up; it plunged her deeper into the nightmare.
Audrey stood on the top step of the museum, the sounds of her own implosion echoing behind her. Her emerald gown felt like a shroud. Her skin felt too tight.
She ran.
Her heels punished the pavement, a frantic, syncopated rhythm of escape. She didn’t know where she was going, only that she had to move. Taxis flew past her, blurs of yellow light. She ignored them.
She ran until her lungs burned and the thin straps of her shoes dug into her skin.
She finally stopped under a streetlight a dozen blocks away, leaning against the cold metal pole to keep from collapsing. She was a spectacle. A woman in a gala gown, crying on a random street corner.
Her phone. She needed help.
Not Kian. Not Cole.
One name. Maya.
Her fingers, clumsy and shaking, found the contact. The phone rang once, twice.
“Audrey? It’s past midnight. Is everything okay?” Maya’s voice was warm, sensible. An anchor.
“No,” Audrey sobbed, the single word breaking apart. “Nothing is okay.”
“Where are you?” Maya’s tone shifted instantly. No more questions. Just action.
Audrey looked up, squinting at a street sign through her tears. “Corner of Lex and 79th.”
“Stay right there. Don’t move. I’m coming.”
The line went dead. Audrey slid down the pole to sit on the curb, wrapping her arms around her knees. She was a refugee from her own life.
Maya’s small, fourth-floor walk-up was a sanctuary. It smelled of lavender and old books. It was messy and real and safe.
Maya handed her a pair of worn sweatpants and a faded college t-shirt. Audrey changed out of the emerald gown, leaving it in a silk puddle on the floor like a shed skin.
“I’m not asking what happened,” Maya said, pressing a steaming mug of tea into Audrey’s hands. “Not tonight. Just drink.”
Audrey did. The warmth seeped into her bones. She sat on the lumpy sofa, staring at the wall. Her clutch buzzed on the coffee table. A relentless, angry vibration.
She picked it up.
The screen was a galaxy of missed calls and notifications. Twelve from Kian. Eight from Cole. Texts from both.
Audrey, please, it wasn’t me. I took care of the problem for you. Cole’s words were a threat wrapped in a lie.
It’s not what you think. Let me fix this. I love you. Kian’s words were a poison she couldn’t afford to drink.
With a deliberate, steady hand, Audrey opened Kian’s contact. She pressed ‘Block’. A small pop-up asked if she was sure.
She was.
She did the same for Cole. Then for his sister, Jenna.
Silence.
She had severed the arteries. She was bleeding out, but at least the poison had stopped pumping through her veins. She put the phone down, face-down, and finally let the exhaustion claim her.
Kian sat in the back of his car, staring at the facade of Audrey’s apartment building. The light in her window was off. She wasn’t there.
He’d called her twenty times. Each call went straight to voicemail after the tenth ring.
Blocked.
The finality of it was a punch to the gut. He couldn’t fix this with words. She wouldn’t hear them. He had to use actions.
He made a call. Not to his mother, not to his COO. He called a number saved under a single letter: X. The man who answered was a ghost, a specialist in finding things that didn’t want to be found.
“I have a job for you,” Kian said, his voice flat and dead. “I need you to find the source of an anonymous complaint filed with the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art regarding a curator named Audrey Wells. I need proof. Digital fingerprints, IP addresses, everything. I need it yesterday.”
“It will be expensive,” the voice on the other end said.
“I don’t care,” Kian snapped. He had all the money in the world. It was worthless if he couldn’t protect her. “And I need it delivered in a way that can’t be traced back to me. Understood?”
“Understood.”
He hung up. That was step one. Undoing the damage.
Step two was harder. He had to explain the unexplainable. The boy. Cassandra. His mother’s web of lies. A text wouldn’t work. A call was impossible.
It had to be a letter.
He told his driver to take him to his office. The real one. The glass tower that scraped the sky. He walked into the penthouse suite, past the priceless art and the panoramic views of the city he owned, and felt nothing.
He sat at a massive mahogany desk and took out a single sheet of heavy, cream-colored paper. His company’s letterhead was embossed at the top. STERLING MARITIME.
He stared at it, then crumpled it in his fist. This couldn’t come from the magnate. It had to come from the man.
He found a plain sheet of paper and a simple pen.
And he began to write.
The next few days were a blur of sleep and silence.
Audrey didn’t leave Maya’s apartment. She called the museum and told them she had the flu, her voice a croak. They were surprisingly understanding.
Maya would leave for work in the morning and return in the evening with groceries and a determinedly cheerful attitude. She never pushed Audrey to talk. She just existed, a quiet, solid presence that kept the walls from closing in.
Audrey spent the hours with her hand resting on her still-flat stomach.
A baby. Her baby.
Was it the child of a lying billionaire who had another family? Or the child of a manipulative sociopath who had destroyed her career to control her?
There was no good answer. This tiny, secret life was the only thing that mattered now. She had to protect it. She had to build a world for it, away from the wreckage of her own.
On the third day, she felt a shift. The crushing weight of despair was still there, but something else was growing beneath it. A hard, cold knot of anger. Of resolve.
They would not break her.
That afternoon, a thick envelope arrived for Maya. Her name was on the front, but the letter inside the first envelope was addressed to Audrey.
A failsafe. He knew she wouldn’t accept anything with his name on it.
“It’s from a courier,” Maya said, handing it to her. “No return address.”
Audrey took it. The paper was heavy, expensive. She knew, with a certainty that made her stomach clench, who it was from. His handwriting was on the front. Just her name.
Audrey.
She stared at it, her thumb tracing the sharp, dark lines of the ink. Her first instinct was to tear it to shreds. To burn it. To erase his words just as she had erased his number.
But she didn’t.
She stood in the middle of Maya’s living room, holding the letter. It felt warm in her hand. It felt dangerous. A key to a door she had locked and barricaded.
He was a liar. His words were his weapon.
But what if, for the first time, they were also the truth?
The question was a tiny crack in her fortress wall. She held the unopened letter, her heart pounding a frantic, terrified, and traitorous rhythm against her ribs.