CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Two days had passed since David left for rehab. Aria stood on the mansion’s east balcony, watching the sun sink behind the city skyline. The ice in her whiskey had harrly begun to melt when she heard footsteps behind her.
“Beautiful evening for plotting murder, isn’t it?”
The glass nearly slipped from her fingers David stood in the doorway, looking considerably worse than when he’d left. Dark circles shadowed his eyes, and his usually perfect hair hure limp around his face.
“You’re supposed to be in rehab She took a deliberate sip, hiding her racing pulse.
“And you’re supposed to be grieving your dead rival.” He stepped onto the balcony “Instead of fucking my father.”
“Careful, band.” The whiskey burned her throat. “You’re starting to sound unhinged “
“Am I?” He laughed, the sound scraping like broken glass. “Tell me something, Arla, Did you push Sofia, or did you just wait for her to fall?”
“encouraged her to practice on that root the same way you encouraged her into your bed,”
The words hung in the air between them. David’s face went slack with realization
“You knew,” he whispered. “All this time, you knew about us.”
Ana set her glass down with enough force to crack it. “Did you think I was stupid? That I wouldn’t notice my fiancé meaking around with my protége?”
“Explain“” The laugh that tore from her throat didn’t sound entirely sane. “Explain how you fucked her in our bed? How you bought her jewelry with my grandmother’s diamonds?”
David finched. “That’snot-
“Not what? Not fair? You want to talk about fair?” Aria advanced on him, trembling with age she didn’t have to fake. “I saw you with her at our engagement party. In our garden. While I was inside picking out china patterns like a good little lancée.”
“It wasn’t planned,” he said weakly. “It just happened.“!
“Things don’t just happen, David. You made choices. Every time you kissed her, touched her, led to my face- those were choices.”
“I loved her.” His voice cracked
“And I loved you!” The words exploded from her chest, raw and real in a way she hadn’t expected. “I trusted you! I was building a
“While plotting to seduce my father?”
a life with you!”
“Is that what you think?” She was screaming now, past caring who heard. “That I threw myself at Marcus? That I enjoyed watching my entire life tall apart because you couldn’t keep your dick in your pants?”
David stumbled back, hitting the balcony railing. “Aria—”
“Don’t!” She grabbed her cracked whiskey glass, hurling it past his head, it shattered against the stone wall “Don’t you dare try to justify what you did!”
David faltered, then he straightened his stance, pulling an envelope from his jacket.
Ana’s angerfaltered at the familiar Holloway Industries letterhead. “What is that?”
“The reason why I am here: Records from twenty years ago.” David’s voice had gone cold. “Ahout your mother’s death.”
The world tilted sideways. “My mother killed herself.”
“In my father’s office building. He pulled out a stack of papers. “After he ended their affair and threatened to expose her gambling debts.”
“No.” Arta’s nees buckded. She grabbed the railing for support. “That’s not She wouldn’t—”
-She was embezzling from the company, David continued mercilessly. “Marcus caught her, used it to force het into a relationship. When she wanted more, he threatened to go public.”
Scop. The word came out as a whimper.
*he jumped from his office window.” David’s voice seemed to come from very far away. “Andle covered it up. Made it look like she’d jumped from the root instead. Kept his name out of the police report.”
Aria slid to the balcony floor, her carefully constructed world crumbling around her, “You’re lying.”
“Am I?” He dropped the papers beside her. “Head it yourself. The police interviews, the forensic reports, the security footage timestamps. It’s all there.”
She stated at the papers, her mother’s signature swimming before her eyes. The same elegant script that had once helped her practice her scales, now contrasing
“Did you knew?” David’s voice had softened “When you started sleeping with him, did you know what he did to her?”
A sub Tote from Asia’s thenat, primal and now. Years of careful planning, of calculated revenge, shattered by a truth she hadn’t seen coming.
“Are you sleeping with him?” David pressed. “Are you fucking the man who drove your mother to suicide?”
Aria pressed her hands against her mouth, trying to hold back the scieans building in her chest. Her silence was answer mough.
David shook his head, disgust and pity wanting on his face. “I don’t know which at us is more fucked up anymore.”
He left her there on the balcony, surrounded by papers that remote her entice history. The sun had set completely now, leaving her in darkness Somewhere in the distance, a siten walled Arla wondered if it was screaming for berinother, twenty years too late.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Her hands found the papers in the dark, fingers tracing her mother’s signature. The elegant loops and swirls that had once seemed so sophisticated now looked desperate, frantic
Like suicide notes usually did
Inside the mansion, she could hear Marcus moving around his study. The man she’d planned to destroy. The man who’d already destroyed everything she’d ever
loved.
Including her mother.
Aria pressed her forehead against the cold stone railing, letting the tears come. They weren’t the pretty, calculated drops she’d shed during David’s outburst at rehearsal.
These tears burned like acid, stripping away the layers of control she’d built around herself. Each sob felt like it was tearing something vital from her chest.
Her symphony waited in the music room, its first movement still unfinished. She wondered if her mother had left any unfinished music behind. If Marcus had kept it, along with all his other secrets.
The thought made her retch, bile rising in her throat.
