The penthouse was a monument to everything Elara had never wanted.
Marble floors so polished she could see her reflection—small, insignificant, draped in a silk nightgown that cost more than her childhood home. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a city that never slept, but she'd never felt more exhausted. The space was cold. Beautiful and suffocating and so goddamn cold.
She'd come looking for warmth. For him.
Stupid.
Elara paused outside Liam's home office, her bare feet silent on imported Italian stone. The door was cracked open—he never closed it all the way when he worked late, some unconscious power play, like even his privacy was a gift he bestowed. Light spilled into the darkened hallway. She'd planned to surprise him. Maybe convince him to come to bed. Maybe—God, how pathetic—maybe just exist in the same room with her husband for five minutes without feeling like an intruder.
Then she heard the voice.
"Finally getting rid of the little house mouse?"
Isabelle. Of course it was Isabelle. His secretary's voice dripped with venom wrapped in silk, the kind of cruelty that came from confidence. From knowing exactly where you stood in the hierarchy.
Elara should have left. Should have turned around. Should have protected herself from whatever came next.
She didn't move.
Liam's laugh cut through the air—not the rare, soft chuckle she'd heard twice in their eighteen-month marriage. This was different. Cold. Dismissive. The sound of a man discussing a minor inconvenience.
"The divorce papers are with my lawyer."
The world tilted.
"One more week of playing the dutiful husband and she'll be out of my life for good."
Her hand found the wall. Steadied herself. Breathed.
"It was a sentimental mistake, marrying her."
Each word landed like a fist.
"A man in my position needs a partner, not a pet."
Pet.
The nausea that had been plaguing her for three weeks surged, violent and immediate. She pressed her palm to her mouth, swallowing bile, swallowing screams. Her other hand—traitor, fool, hopeful idiot—flew to her stomach.
Still flat. Still secret. Still—
The baby.
The tiny cluster of cells she'd discovered four days ago. The miracle she'd been terrified and thrilled to tell him about. The hope she'd clung to like a lifeline in a marriage that was drowning her inch by inch.
He would see it as a chain.
The thought crystallized with brutal clarity. Liam Vance didn't do complications. Didn't do weakness. Didn't do anything that couldn't be scheduled, optimized, controlled. A child? His child?
He would tolerate it. Mold it. Shape it into another asset in the Vance empire.
He would never love it.
And Elara—God, Elara would watch their baby grow up starving for scraps of affection from a man carved from ambition and ice. She'd watch those bright little eyes dim, watch tiny hands reach for a father who was always one meeting, one acquisition, one empire away from present.
No.
Something shifted inside her. Not broke—breaking implied there'd been something whole to shatter. This was different. This was calcification. Crystallization. The soft, hopeful parts of her flash-freezing into something diamond-hard and unbreakable.
Inside the office, Isabelle's voice continued, sultry and satisfied. "When should I book us for the Maldives? After the papers are signed?"
"Make it two weeks. I want this finished cleanly."
Cleanly.
Like their marriage was a business deal gone south. Like she was a failed investment to write off.
Elara looked down at her left hand. The obscene diamond caught the low light—five carats of blood money, picked by his assistant because Liam didn't have time for sentimentality. She'd worn it anyway. Convinced herself it meant something.
She twisted it off. The metal scraped skin. Good. She wanted to feel something other than the yawning void opening in her chest.
The ring hit the marble with a crystalline ping that echoed through the hallway.
She didn't wait to see if they heard it.
Her feet carried her to the bedroom—not their bedroom, never theirs, his with her things awkwardly scattered in corners he never looked at. She grabbed her phone. Her wallet. The worn leather jacket that had survived her college years, the one Liam had asked her to throw away a dozen times.
Nothing else.
Let him have the designer wardrobe, the jewelry, the life she'd never asked for. Let him have every expensive thing he'd draped on her like costume jewelry on a doll.
The elevator descended forty-three floors. She counted every one.
The lobby was empty except for the night doorman, who startled when he saw her—barefoot, wild-eyed, wearing a nightgown and a jacket that didn't match.
"Mrs. Vance? Is everything—"
"Don't call me that."
She walked past him. Through the glass doors. Into the November rain that had started while she was upstairs dying.
The cold was vicious. Immediate. It soaked through silk in seconds, plastered her hair to her skull, numbed her feet on concrete that smelled like wet asphalt and exhaust and freedom.
Behind her, the penthouse glowed like a lighthouse. Like a prison. Like everything she'd escaped.
Her hand found her stomach again. Protective. Fierce.
"You're mine," she whispered to the rain, to the tiny secret tucked beneath her heart. "Only mine. And I swear to God, I will burn the world down before I let him make you feel like I did."
The rain came harder. She tilted her face to the sky and let it wash away the tears she refused to acknowledge.
Somewhere up there, in his office, Liam Vance was probably still laughing. Still planning his clean exit. Still completely unaware that his dutiful pet had just walked out with teeth bared.
He'd taken everything from her—her pride, her heart, her foolish, foolish hope.
But she took something too.
She took his heir.