Chapter 4 — Seven Days

Tanith

The morning sun cut through the drapes of the master wing suite. My body felt beaten—every muscle stiff from the surgery—but my head was clear.

By nine o’clock I sat at the vanity in a white blouse and tailored trousers. I pulled the blue hospital bracelet tight against my wrist, slipped a pair of scissors under the plastic, and snipped it in half. It fell onto the vanity with a quiet thud.

Proof discarded. Now the work.

By ten o’clock the managing partner of Sterling & Vance sat across from me in the morning room. By eleven the petition for dissolution of marriage had been drafted, signed, and sent by court courier to Rourke Group headquarters.

My instructions were precise: Hand deliver to Caspian Rourke. In the main boardroom.

The call came less than forty-five minutes later.

I was in the conservatory with a cup of black tea when my phone vibrated against the table. Caspian’s name lit the screen. I let it ring three times before answering.

“Have you lost your fucking mind, Tanith?”

His voice exploded through the speaker, tight and sharp. In the background I heard the low murmur of an interrupted board meeting.

“You had a process server walk into the middle of my quarterly strategy presentation?” he hissed. “In front of the entire executive board? In front of our prospective partners? Do you have any idea how unhinged this makes you look?”

I set the teacup down. “It wasn’t meant to make me look like anything. It was meant to deliver legal documents. You received them, didn’t you?”

“Stop this humiliation,” he barked, dropping into a harsh whisper as he presumably stepped into the hallway. “Stop this passive-aggressive bullshit. You’re angry. I get it. You spent the night stewing and now you want to punish me. But involving my company—my board—crosses a line.”

“You have seven days,” I said. My voice was flat.

A pause. “What?”

“You have seven days to sign the uncontested settlement. It leaves you Rourke Group, leaves you the house, and demands nothing beyond the clean severance of our legal ties. If you cooperate, it stays quiet. If you refuse, my attorney proceeds formally. Discovery, asset tracing, public filings. Seven days, Caspian.”

A bitter laugh. “Seven days? You’re giving me an ultimatum?”

I stayed silent.

“Tanith, listen to yourself,” he said, shifting into patronizing pity. “You’re not thinking rationally. You’ve lived in a bubble for five years. You haven’t had to manage a real crisis or survive on your own since the day you married me. You don’t know how the world works anymore. You think you can just throw a fit, sign a piece of paper, and step back into reality? You will be eaten alive.”

I went still.

He took the silence as hesitation. His voice softened into the coaxing register he used when closing a hostile deal.

“Come home, Tanith. Just come back to Rourke House. I’ll overlook this. We can chalk it up to post-surgical distress and move past it. We’re better than this.”

I stared out at the garden.

“Is Vesper still staying at the house?” I asked.

He sighed. “Tanith, don’t start. Vesper is traumatized. The gallery incident was a security breach, and she has nowhere else she feels safe right now. She’s staying in the guest wing until—”

I ended the call.

I didn’t slam the phone down. I simply pressed the red circle, cutting him off mid-sentence, and laid the phone face down on the table.

At two o’clock Arthur Pendelton arrived.

He was a silver-haired man in his late fifties who had managed my personal wealth since my twenty-first birthday. He sat opposite me in the library, a folio open between us.

“We have begun revoking your joint signing authority on the domestic accounts, Miss Bellamy,” he said. “The primary joint credit lines have been frozen, and the secondary deeds attached to Rourke House are being transferred into Mr. Rourke’s name, as instructed.”

“Good.” I leaned forward carefully, protecting my abdomen. “Now the secondary portfolio.”

Arthur looked up. “The secondary portfolio?”

“The shadow guarantees.”

For five years Caspian had run Rourke Group believing he was a prodigy. He believed the firm’s rise, its low interest rates, and its access to prime real estate were the natural results of his leadership.

He didn’t know about the quiet collateral agreements my trust had filed behind his corporate debt. He didn’t know that three of his biggest institutional investors only sat at his table because I held personal equity in their parent funds. He didn’t know that the permits for his flagship development had been approved because of a ten-minute call I made to the city planning commissioner—a man who had served on my mother’s foundation for twenty years.

“I want every private guarantee terminated,” I said. “Every informal credit backing, every preferential liquidity arrangement, every personal line of credit extended to Rourke Group subsidiaries under my name or my trust. Cancel them all.”

Arthur’s pen hovered. “Miss Bellamy… terminate all of them? Some of these arrangements are foundational to Rourke Group’s expansion in the eastern district. They rely heavily on the quiet backing of your family’s credit rating.”

“I know.”

“If we pull these, their prime lenders will re-evaluate the risk exposure. Liquidity will tighten within days. The introductions you secured with the Vance Consortium will evaporate. They will feel the effects quickly.”

He leaned forward. “Are you certain? Once severed, they cannot be reinstated without significant public disclosure.”

I looked at the gathering clouds beyond the window. Five years of my life, my talent, and my family’s quiet power had been poured into building a pedestal for a man who looked at me bleeding in a hospital bed and saw only an inconvenience.

I turned back to Arthur.

“Everything,” I said. “Terminate everything.”

He searched my face for any trace of hesitation. He found none.

He nodded, lowered his pen, and made a firm checkmark on the master file.

“It will take roughly forty-eight hours for the institutions to process the revocations,” he said. “When the credit re-evaluations hit his desk, Mr. Rourke will realize what has happened. He will likely come looking for an explanation.”

I stood, smoothing the front of my trousers.

“That’s no longer my responsibility.”