CHAPTER 004

The printer in the copy room spat out the resignation letter in under a minute. I stood there and watched the page slide out and I picked it up while the ink was still warm and looked at it for a moment.

Soon I would be completely free of Alexander Hagreeves.

I took it straight to HR. The woman behind the desk looked at it carefully, then looked up at me with an apologetic expression pressed into the corners of her mouth. The letter required the signature of the CEO. It required seeing Alexander... again.

I hesitated for a single second, then turned around and headed back. It was no big deal. I simply wanted this finished as quickly as possible.

What had just happened in the office had left everyone utterly stunned. Before I had walked out to print the letter, Liam had actually come up and pressed the back of his hand to my forehead, asking in complete seriousness whether I had a fever, because how else could I have said what I had said? Romy kept muttering that I must not have gotten enough sleep the night before. Even Dorothy had looked at me with narrow assessing eyes, trying to work out whether I was actually telling the truth for once.

And Alexander had done nothing at all.

For the first time that day he had truly looked at me. Not with anger, not with the usual flat indifference, but with a deep bewildered stupefaction that he couldn't quite hide behind his composure. He had wanted to say something. I could see it in the way his jaw had shifted, the way his mouth had opened and then closed again. He had wanted to ask if I was serious, or what on earth had gotten into me. But his pride would not allow it.

Between Maeve Quinlan and Alexander Hagreeves, it had always been Maeve who bowed her head first. Always Maeve who admitted fault first, who apologised first, who came back first. Alexander had grown so accustomed to that dynamic that the idea of being the one to bend first was simply not something he was built to do.

He was waiting for me to come back on my own.

I pushed open the office door.

Everyone inside turned to look at me at once.

Alexander's hand dropped immediately from Dorothy's waist. She was standing so close to him, their lips almost touched.

He took a quick step back.

"Dorothy just stumbled," Liam said quickly, sitting up straighter. "Alexander was only steadying her."

That had absolutely nothing to do with me. He did not need to explain it. I had not come back for explanations.

Alexander gave a light cough and straightened in his seat. As he watched me walk toward him, the corners of his mouth curved upward slowly, involuntarily, like he couldn't quite keep the satisfaction off his face. His expression said everything he wasn't saying out loud. I knew it. I knew you still cared. I knew you couldn't actually leave.

I held the resignation letter out to him.

The smile froze on his face.

He stared at the paper in my hand, and then he stared at me, and the triumphant composure cracked right down the middle. His jaw clenched. The muscle along the side of it tightened and released and tightened again. He took so long to reach for the document that I eventually set it down on the desk in front of him myself.

He picked it up. Read it. Set it down. Picked it up and read it again. He still did not sign it.

"Sis, you're not actually going to resign, are you?" Dorothy had not moved from the sofa. She was watching me with wide eyes that were performing shock remarkably well.

"In that case, are you genuinely not going to attend Alexander's birthday party?" she pressed.

"I won't be going to the party," I said. "Think whatever you like."

Dorothy's eyes slid to Alexander for just a fraction of a second, then came back to me. "If Alexander were to invite me to be his partner at the party," she said, with the lightness of someone asking about the weather, "you wouldn't get jealous, would you?"

There it was. Her true agenda, finally out in the open.

Not a guest. A partner. The person who would stand beside Alexander and share the first dance of the evening with him. That role had only ever belonged to Alexander's girlfriend or his fiancée. Everyone standing in that room understood exactly what Dorothy was reaching for and what it would mean if she got it. She wanted my place. She had always wanted my place.

"None of this has anything to do with me anymore." I meant every word of it. The shadow of my own death in my previous life hung over every inch of this room. Dorothy and Alexander were both cancerous growths that I had carried in my life for far too long. I was done. "Please mail the signed letter to me when you're finished."

I turned and walked toward the door without hesitating.

I had taken only a few steps when a hand closed around my arm and yanked me back, hard and sudden, spinning me around before I had time to process what was happening.

Alexander.

His warm fingers wrapped around my arm and he was standing close, closer than he had been all day, and his voice came out low and dangerous in the way it only did when he was working very hard to contain an emotion.

"Where do you think you're going?”