Chapter 156. Sabatine’s Breaking Point

Chapter 156. Sabatine’s Breaking Point

The boardroom victory was absolute, chilling, and exhausting. The Ice Gallery emptied slowly, the chastened board members filing out with murmured, hollow pleasantries, their eyes carefully avoiding Sabatine as if he were a newly installed, electrified fence. The air still vibrated with the aftershock of Anton’s ultimatum.

Anton remained at the head of the table, debriefing quietly with Jessica, his posture easing from battlefield commander to weary CEO. He glanced at Sabatine, a question in his eyes—Are you alright?—but didn’t approach, giving him space in the sudden, brittle quiet.

Sabatine gave a tight nod, then turned and walked out. He moved through the hushed, gleaming corridors of the executive floor, a ghost in his own new kingdom. The staff he passed—assistants, analysts, security personnel—all looked at him differently now. Not with the open curiosity or suspicion of before, but with a new, wary deference. They had seen the memo. They had heard, through the soundproof walls or the building’s vicious gossip network, the seismic shift in the boardroom. He was no longer a story. He was the new authority.

It should have felt like a triumph. It felt like a sentence.

He didn’t go to the lavish office that was being prepared for him next to Anton’s. Instead, he found a forgotten stairwell, a concrete and steel spine in the heart of the glass tower, and climbed. He pushed through a heavy door onto a barren, wind-whipped maintenance terrace on the 50th floor. London sprawled below, a toy city under a flat, grey sky. The cold air was a slap, scouring away the stifling, recycled atmosphere of the boardroom.

And there, alone with the keening wind and the distant sirens, Sabatine broke.

It wasn’t a dramatic collapse. He didn’t slump or cry out. He simply leaned his forearms on the cold metal railing, bowed his head, and let the silent tears come. They were hot and furious, scouring tracks down his cheeks before the wind chilled them to ice.

He wasn’t crying because of Roland Cross. The man’s poison was just noise. He wasn’t crying from the stress or the fear of the past days, though that was a part of the bedrock. He was crying because of Anton.

Because Anton’s defense in that room hadn’t felt like a defense. It had felt like a vow. A sacred, terrifying, public vow.

“My trust in him is absolute, and it is the most professional conviction I hold.”

“He is the integrity we believed we had.”

“You will accept this appointment.”

Anton hadn’t just protected him; he had enshrined him. He had taken Sabatine’s fractured, guilty history and his hard-won skills and had declared them the new cornerstone of his empire. He had staked his own authority, his legacy, on Sabatine’s worth. He had looked at the most powerful people in his world and said, This man is more important than your approval, than your comfort, than your decades of precedent.

It was the most profound act of faith Sabatine had ever witnessed. And it was crushing him.

Because a vow demanded an answer. A promise of that magnitude required a reciprocal guarantee. Can I be that for him? The question was a black hole, sucking in every shred of his self-doubt.

He was a man built on failure. His own family had disowned him for a mission gone wrong. His career had ended in disgrace. He had spent years as a phantom, his only worth the truths he could dig up for others. He was good at uncovering corruption, not at being a foundation. He was a scalpel, not a pillar.

Anton saw a keystone. Sabatine felt like cracked stone, liable to crumble under the weight.

The tears came harder, silent sobs wracking his frame. He cried for the ghost he’d been, the simple, painful clarity of a life defined by atonement. He cried for the terrifying, beautiful reality of being seen so completely, and the even more terrifying responsibility it entailed. He cried because he wanted it, God, he wanted that future Anton was building with such fierce, reckless love—the partnership, the shared purpose, the quiet mornings after the storms. But the wanting was intertwined with a paralyzing fear that he would break it, that his damaged soul would corrode the brilliant, pristine thing Anton believed him to be.

The wind stole his heat, his breath. He felt hollowed out, scraped raw. He’d faced down gunfire, terrorists, and global conspiracies with a colder heart than this. But this—this unconditional, public, monumental faith—was the battlefield he didn’t know how to cross.

He didn’t hear the stairwell door open. He only felt the sudden cessation of the wind as a large, solid form moved to stand beside him at the railing, blocking the gust. He didn’t need to look. He knew the presence, the scent of him—sandalwood and resolve.

Anton didn’t speak. He didn’t touch him. He simply stood there, a silent bulwark against the elements, waiting. He had known. Of course he had known. He had seen the fracture behind Sabatine’s professional mask in the boardroom, had given him space to flee, and had then followed the trail of his despair to this desolate perch.

After a long time, when Sabatine’s silent tears had subsided to shaky breaths, Anton spoke, his voice low, carried away in the wind.

“I pushed too hard.”

Sabatine shook his head, still not looking at him. “You were perfect. You were… magnificent. They’ll never question you again.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Anton shifted, turning to lean his back against the railing, facing Sabatine’s profile. “I pushed you too hard. I declared a war on your behalf without asking if you wanted to be a general. I built you a palace and didn’t check if you liked the architecture.”

A ragged, wet sound that was almost a laugh escaped Sabatine. “It’s a very nice palace.”

“It’s a gilded cage if you don’t want it,” Anton said, his voice raw with a new kind of fear. “I was so focused on protecting you from them, I didn’t stop to think if I was overwhelming you with me.”

Finally, Sabatine turned his head. Anton’s face was pale, his eyes searching Sabatine’s tear-streaked face with a vulnerability that mirrored his own. The billionaire was gone. This was just the man, scared he’d broken the one thing that mattered.

“It’s not you,” Sabatine whispered, the words torn from him. “It’s the… the weight of what you see. You see a keystone. Anton, I’m… I’m damaged goods. I’m a man who carries graves. What if I can’t hold up what you’re building? What if I fail you? Not in a firefight, but in a board meeting? In a quiet moment when you need me to be solid, and I’m just… fragments?”

Anton listened, his expression not pitying, but fiercely attentive. When Sabatine finished, he was silent for a moment, looking out at the city he ruled.

“Do you know why I never rebuilt my father’s study after the fire?” he asked, apropos of nothing.

Sabatine blinked, confused. “What?”

“The west wing fire, ten years ago. It destroyed his study, his library, and all his trophies. I had the wing restored, but I left that room as a shell. Empty. I could have recreated it perfectly. But I didn’t.” He turned back to Sabatine, his gaze direct. “Because perfection is a lie. It’s brittle. It has no memory, no character. It can’t bear weight because it has never been tested.”

He reached out then, not to pull Sabatine into an embrace, but to take his hand, turning it over to trace the lines on his palm, the calluses, the faint scars. “You are not damaged goods, Sabatine. You are a tested thing. A proven thing. Every scar, every grave, every shadow in your eyes is a stress-test you survived. That is what makes you strong. Not in spite of the breaks, but because of them. You don’t have to be a pristine pillar. Be the reinforced steel. Be the thing that’s been through the fire and knows how to bend without breaking.”

He lifted Sabatine’s hand and pressed his lips to the centre of his palm, a kiss so tender it stole the air from Sabatine’s lungs. “I don’t need a perfect man. I need a real one. I need you. Fragments and all. And I will spend every day of my life proving to you that your broken pieces fit perfectly with mine.”

The vow was still there. But this time, it wasn’t a declaration to a boardroom. It was a whisper on a windy terrace. It wasn’t a demand for Sabatine to be a foundation. It was a plea for him to simply be, and a promise to be the mortar for his cracks.

The breaking point wasn’t a shatter. It was a release. The dam of old guilt and cold fear gave way, not to a flood of more doubt, but to a cautious, aching hope. He wasn’t being asked to be perfect. He was being asked to be his.

Sabatine turned his hand, lacing his fingers through Anton’s. He didn’t have grand words. He had the truth, small and hard-won.

“I’m scared,” he admitted, the rawest confession of all.

Anton brought their joined hands to his own chest, holding them over his heart. “So am I,” he said, his voice thick. “But we’ll be scared together. That’s the deal.”

Sabatine looked at their joined hands, then into Anton’s eyes, and gave the only answer he had. He leaned forward, resting his forehead against Anton’s, closing his eyes. A surrender. An acceptance. A promise to try.

They stood like that for a long time, two broken, mending men on a ledge high above the world, the wind weaving around them, no longer an enemy, but just the sound of the earth turning, carrying them into an unknown, terrifying, beautiful future—together.

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