Chapter 23 — Serena's Revenge

POV: SERENA

By the time I reached Evelyn’s building, I had watched the clip of Julian being slammed into a wall eleven times.

I'd already taken screenshots of three different angles and saved them to a folder I’d told myself I'd never actually use for anything.

I used to think Julian was the kind of man who never lost. Smooth, controlled, and always three steps ahead of whoever he was talking to.

Watching him get lifted off the ground by his own throat, like a misbehaving child, had been, without question, the best thirty seconds of my week.

It felt good to watch him get exactly what he'd always had coming. It felt even better knowing I wasn't the only one having a terrible month.

Everyone was talking about it. My phone had not stopped buzzing since the footage leaked, with half my friends sending it with laughing emojis and the other half sending fake concern that barely hid their own amusement.

Even my own mother had texted me the clip, adding nothing but three laughing emojis and a single word.

Finally.

She hadn't texted me at all in days before that, not since the and not since Nikolai's threat had made her go oddly quiet about Beatrix's new husband.

Julian Vance, humiliated in front of half the city's money. It was, in its own petty way, the best thing that had happened to me in weeks.

I was still furious about dinner. Nikolai's threat to have me removed from his own table kept replaying in my head at the worst possible moments, in the shower, in line at the pharmacy, and lying awake at two in the morning, hating how completely he'd won.

Beatrix, sitting there with her hand wrapped in his under that table, like she'd actually earned something. Like she was better than me now.

She wasn't. She'd just been lucky, and I meant to remind everyone of that eventually, once I figured out how.

Martha kept saying we needed to be patient, that these things would eventually fall apart on their own. I was done being patient. For the last month, patience had gotten me nowhere.

I had spent the drive over-rehearsing exactly what I would say if I ever got the chance to tell someone how unfair the whole thing was.

My sister, plain and forgettable for years, suddenly married a billionaire while I was still fielding calls from men who only wanted to be seen with me, never actually with me.

It was cold enough that my breath showed in the streetlight, and I'd been standing near the entrance for almost twenty minutes when he finally appeared, telling myself I was just out for a walk and not that I had specifically driven across town to intercept him.

I saw Julian coming out of Evelyn's building around nine that night, moving fast, head down, a bruise already darkening along his throat where Nikolai's hand had been.

I barely recognized him at first.

The Julian I remembered from Beatrix's engagement party years ago had walked into every room like he owned it. This version looked like a man glancing over his shoulder. He seemed smaller than I remembered. Less untouchable.

I stepped straight into his path.

"Rough week," I said.

He stopped short, clearly not expecting to see me standing there.

"What do you want, Serena?"

"Nothing. Just admiring the view." I let my eyes drift pointedly to the bruise on his neck. "That's going to look great in photos for a while."

"Get out of my way."

"Or what? You'll have me thrown across a room too?" I laughed, though it came out sharper than I meant, more bitter than amused. "Careful. That trick's already taken."

He didn't laugh. He just stared at me with the weary look of a man who had already been humiliated enough for one week and had no reserves left for a second round.

****

POV: JULIAN

I did not have the patience for Serena Holloway tonight, of all nights, standing there in the cold outside Evelyn's building, with a bruise on my throat and my entire professional reputation trending online for all the wrong reasons.

Evelyn had spent the past hour upstairs, alternating between concern and quiet, pointed questions about why a billionaire had felt the need to nearly kill me in front of her father's business associates.

I did not have a good answer for her. I was not sure I had one for myself, either.

"Move," I said.

She didn't. If anything, she planted herself more firmly in front of me, arms crossed, with something calculating in her expression that I recognized because I had worn that same expression myself more times than I could count.

"We're a lot alike, you know," she said. "You and I."

"I seriously doubt that."

"Both of us spent years being useful to people who never once bothered to actually like us." She said it lightly, like she was discussing the weather. "I watched you use my sister for four years. I know exactly what that particular skill set looks like from the outside."

"You have no idea what tonight cost me," I said instead.

"I have a few ideas. I watched the clip like everyone else in this city."

"It's not just the throat." My voice came out rougher than I'd meant it to, the evening's humiliation still hot and unsettled in my chest. "It's watching a man like that look at a woman like her the way he looked at her tonight. Like she was worth defending. I never once looked at her like that in four years."

Saying it out loud surprised me. I had not meant to admit that to anyone, least of all Serena Holloway, on a public sidewalk with a bruise still throbbing beneath my collar.

She didn't gloat, which surprised me almost as much as my own confession had. She just nodded slowly, as if she'd expected exactly that answer and filed it away somewhere useful.

"She always landed better than she deserved," Serena said.

"She got lucky."

"She got lucky twice, if you count the marriage." Serena studied me for a long moment. "Doesn't it make you angry? Watching both of us get treated like leftovers while she gets handed everything neither of us could ever manage to hold onto?"

It did. It made me angrier than I wanted to admit, standing on a public sidewalk with a bruised throat and a woman I had never particularly respected watching me like she already knew exactly which nerve she'd found.

I had spent four years building a version of myself that never lost, never got caught flat-footed, and never ended up on the losing end of a public spectacle.

One night with Nikolai Ashcombe had undone everything in under a minute.

"What exactly are you proposing?" I asked because whatever this was, it was clearly going somewhere, and I preferred to know the destination before I kept walking toward it.

"I don't know yet." She smiled slowly, as if thinking it over. "But I think you and I could be useful to each other. Two people who both have very good reasons to want to see a certain marriage fall apart."

I did not agree to anything. I want that recorded, even for myself.

I did not say yes, did not shake her hand, and did not commit to any plan while sitting there in the cold outside Evelyn's building, my reputation in ruins and my pride still aching worse than my throat.

I told myself that it mattered. The absence of an explicit agreement meant I was still, technically, uninvolved in whatever Serena Holloway was quietly building toward.

I also didn’t tell her to leave.

Instead, she pulled out her phone, unlocked it, and held it out to me without asking.

"Number," she said. "In case either of us thinks of something useful."

I typed it in. Even now, I am not entirely sure why I did.

She pocketed the phone, gave me one last look, somewhere between triumphant and hungry, and walked off into the night without waiting for me to change my mind.

I stood alone on the sidewalk for a long moment afterward, my throat aching and my reputation in tatters, and told myself this had not really been a decision.

Somewhere upstairs, Evelyn was probably still waiting for an explanation I had no intention of giving her.

Standing there in the cold, with Serena's number already saved in my phone under a name I had not decided on yet, I found that I did not particularly care whether she was waiting or not.

I didn’t entirely believe myself, or any of it.

Whatever Serena Holloway thought she was building tonight, I realized I was curious enough to find out where it led, even if I would never have admitted that to anyone standing on that sidewalk with me.