The rain came down in cold, slick sheets, plastering Cole Anderson’s hair to his forehead. He didn’t feel it. He stood across the street from the Metropolitan Arts Museum, a dark silhouette against the bleeding glow of the streetlights, and stared.
Her sanctuary. Her temple.
He pulled out his phone, the screen slick with rain. He looked at the photo again. The one he’d taken. Audrey, standing in the window of his condo, her hand on the slight curve of her stomach. The magnate’s heir growing inside her.
The rage was a physical thing, a hot, metallic poison in his throat.
He had built her. He had polished her, refined her, given her the confidence to create this exhibit. Her success was supposed to be his success. She was the final piece of his perfect life, and that dock-rat in a billionaire’s suit had just walked in and stolen her. Stolen his child. Stolen his future.
He’d tried playing their game. The text message had been a warning. A reminder that he could still reach her. But it hadn’t worked. He knew it wouldn’t. They were holed up in his condo, planning their victory. They thought they had won.
They didn’t understand. For a man like Cole, losing wasn’t an option. If he couldn’t possess her, he would destroy what she loved. He would burn her temple to the ground.
He’d spent years listening to her talk about the museum. He knew every detail. Knew about the old service entrance in the rear alley, the one with the faulty magnetic lock the board kept refusing to budget for. He knew the security guard, a man named Henderson, did his rounds on the second floor between two and two-thirty in the morning like clockwork.
He pocketed his phone and pulled up the collar of his expensive coat. He’d come prepared. In the inner pocket, a slim pry bar rested, cold and heavy against his ribs.
The alley was a canyon of wet brick and overflowing dumpsters. The service door was exactly where she’d said it would be. He worked the pry bar into the seam. It took less than a minute. A soft, metallic pop, and he was in.
The air inside was cool, sterile, and silent. It smelled of history and floor polish. He moved through the darkened corridors with a predator’s certainty, his footsteps muffled by the marble floors. He was a ghost in her holy place.
He reached the grand hall where her exhibit, Echoes of the Sea: A Maritime History, was displayed. It was her life’s work. Her soul made manifest in glass cases and carefully worded placards.
He saw the artifacts Kian had helped her research. He saw the centerpiece, the priceless Grecian amphora Kian had secured on loan, sitting on a velvet pedestal under a single, soft spotlight.
Sterling’s grand gesture. The billionaire saving the day.
Cole’s hand tightened around the pry bar. The unfairness of it all was a living thing, clawing at his insides.
He pulled his phone back out. His thumb hovered over his contacts, then pressed one. Jenna.
She answered on the second ring, her voice thick with sleep. “Cole? What’s wrong? It’s the middle of the night.”
“He thinks he won,” Cole whispered, his voice a raw, ragged thing. He paced in front of a display case filled with antique nautical maps. “He thinks he can just take her. Take everything.”
“Cole, where are you?” Jenna’s voice sharpened with alarm. “You sound strange. What have you done?”
“I’m making things right,” he snarled. “She’s in over her head. This exhibit… it’s too much for her. When it all falls apart, when the insurance investigators find what a mess she’s made, who will she turn to? Who’s always been there to clean up her messes?”
A horrified gasp came from the other end. “Oh my god, Cole. You’re at the museum. Don’t do this. It’s over! You’ll go to jail!”
“She did it for the money,” he said, the lie forming easily, beautifully, on his tongue. He was already crafting the narrative. “Desperate people do desperate things. A few broken artifacts, a big insurance payout. I’ll be the one to help her through the scandal.”
“You’re insane!” Jenna was crying now. “Please, Cole, just go home. We’ll figure this out. Don’t throw your life away!”
He laughed, a short, ugly sound that echoed in the cavernous hall. “My life is already gone.”
He hung up on his sister’s pleas.
He turned to the nearest display case. Inside was a collection of eighteenth-century scrimshaw, delicate whalebone carvings Audrey had spent months acquiring. She’d told him once they were her favorite part of the collection.
He raised the pry bar.
The sound of shattering glass was a gunshot in the silence. It was exhilarating. He brought the bar down again and again, the priceless artifacts splintering into white dust and jagged shards.
He moved through the exhibit like a storm. He ripped tapestries from the walls. He overturned pedestals. He dragged the sharp end of the pry bar across the placards Audrey had so painstakingly written, gouging her words into illegibility.
This wasn’t just destruction. It was an erasure.
He saved the centerpiece for last. The Grecian amphora. Kian’s trophy. Their trophy.
He stalked toward it, his shoes crunching on the debris of his own making. The entire gallery was a wasteland. A monument to his rage. He felt a profound, satisfying sense of power. This was a masterpiece of its own kind. A masterpiece of ruin.
He stood before the ancient vase, its elegant lines and faded paintings a testament to a world of beauty and order he could no longer stand to look at. He would shatter it. He would grind it into the floor. He would take away the one thing the great Kian Sterling had given her.
He gripped the pry bar with both hands, the cold steel feeling like an extension of his own arm. He breathed in the scent of dust and devastation.
He raised the weapon high above his head, muscles coiling in his back, ready to bring it down in one final, unforgivable arc.