Chapter 2: Pieces out of place

Killian’s POV

The gala was still going.

That was the part that didn’t make sense. Three hundred people still laughing, still drinking, still moving through a room that felt completely different to me now, like a house after a fire where everything looks the same but nothing is. The music was still playing. The champagne was still flowing. David Chen was telling a joke to a group of investors near the bar and they were laughing like the last twenty minutes had not happened at all.

I stood at the edge of the dance floor with a drink I had not touched and watched the door Serena had been taken through. 

“Killian.” Vivian’s hand found my arm. “Stop looking at it.”

“She said she didn’t do it.”

“I know what you’re feeling right now. I know how much she meant to you. But you have seen the evidence with your own eyes. The wire transfers. The leaked documents. Three weeks of forensic accounting with her name on every single transaction.” She searched my face. “You did not imagine that. You did not make it up. What she was doing to you and to this company was real.”

She was right. I knew she was right. My own accountant had built the case piece by piece and I had sat across that desk and watched the numbers line up like a verdict I couldn’t argue with. The Mercer account. The Hartwell transfers. Serena’s access codes on every single one.

And yet…

I kept replaying the horror on her face when I had her removed. The way her hands reached for me while screaming my name. 

Like I was making a very big mistake.

I had called her seven times after security took her out. She hadn’t answered once.

Why would she when I’d just humiliated her?

“Come back to the party,” Vivian said. “You have investors to speak to. Tonight was supposed to be a celebration.”

I opened my mouth to respond when my phone buzzed.

I looked at the screen. It was from Marcus, my head of security.

“Give me a minute.” I turned away from Vivian before she could answer and pressed the phone to my ear. 

“What is it?”

“There’s been an accident sir.” His voice had that particular tightness it got when the information he was carrying was bad. “A vehicle matching Miss Cole’s registration. Intersection of 5th and Monroe.” A pause. “It’s bad.”

I don’t remember putting the drink down. I don’t remember pushing through the crowd or saying anything to Vivian or going through the lobby. 

I remember the rain hitting my face when the front doors opened and I remember running and I remember thinking she has to be okay, she has to be okay, she has to be okay like it was the only thought my brain could produce.

The intersection was four blocks away. I covered them in under three minutes.

The scene stopped me cold.

I smelled the accident before I saw it. Burning rubber. Something chemical underneath. Then I turned the corner and the scene hit me all at once and I stopped moving completely.

Her car was on its side against a concrete barrier. The front end was gone. Just gone, folded into itself like paper, the windshield shattered across the wet road in a thousand pieces that caught the ambulance lights and glittered. Two other cars had pulled over, their drivers standing in the rain with their phones raised, recording, the way people always did when something terrible happened to someone else.

“Sir, you need to stay back…”

I walked past the paramedic like he hadn’t spoken.

They were lifting her onto a stretcher when I reached the wreckage. I saw her face for one second. Just one second before they got the board under her and blocked my view. White. Completely white. A deep cut above her temple, blood already matting into her hair, running in thin lines down her cheek and dripping from her jaw.

She looked so small.

That was the thing that broke me. I had known Serena for three years. I had watched her walk into rooms full of men twice her size and take them apart with a pitch deck and a smile. I had watched her negotiate contracts that made our lawyers nervous. I had never once thought of her as small.

She looked small on that stretcher in the rain.

Something cracked open in my chest.

I rode in the ambulance. I don’t remember getting in but I was in it, sitting against the cold metal wall, watching the paramedics work over her with a focused efficiency that told me nothing about whether she was going to be alright. I asked once. Nobody answered. I didn’t ask again.

The waiting room was the kind of bright that felt aggressive at 1 AM. Plastic chairs. A television on the wall with the sound off. A vending machine humming in the corner. I sat in a chair near the window with my jacket soaked through and my hands clasped between my knees and I stared at the floor and tried to think clearly.

I couldn’t think clearly.

All I could think about was the way she had looked at me before security grabbed her. Not with anger. Not even with hatred, which would have been easier. With something that looked like disbelief. Like she genuinely could not understand how I could stand there and look at her like that after everything.

Three years, Killian. You know me.

Did I? 

Vivian must have arrived at some point. I was too out of it to notice. 

She sat beside me and put her hand over mine. “How is she?”

“I…don’t know.” 

After what felt like years instead of hours, the doctor came out at 2 AM. 

He looked at me and I knew. I knew before he opened his mouth. I had stood in a hospital corridor like this one before, outside my father’s room, and I had seen that expression on a doctor’s face and I had learned what it meant.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We did everything we could. Miss Cole did not survive her injuries.”

The waiting room went very quiet.

Vivian’s hand tightened over mine. She said something. I heard her voice but not the words.

I stared at the floor.

She was dead. Serena was dead. Three years of building a life together and my girlfriend was dead in a hospital at 2 AM and the last thing I had said to her was remove her. Like she was garbage. 

“There’s something you need to remember,” Vivian’s voice dragged me back to the present. “Whatever you’re feeling right now, the evidence was real. What she did was real. Her dying doesn’t change what she was doing to you and to this company. You made the right call tonight.”

I looked at her, my entire body numb. 

“The right call,” I repeated.

“Yes.” She squeezed my hand. “You protected yourself. You protected everything you built. That is not something to feel guilty about.”

I tried to nod, but it felt like I’d been shot by an arrow. Everything hurt. 

Marcus appeared in the doorway of the waiting room, his coat soaked through. He crossed to me and crouched down, dropping his voice while Vivian moved away. “I got the preliminary from the first responders. The car’s brake line was severed.” He held my gaze. “Clean cut. Not wear and tear. Someone did this deliberately.”

What?

“Her car was serviced last week,” My voice didn’t even sound like mine. “I know because I paid for it. Company policy for all senior staff.”

Marcus nodded once.

I looked up slowly.

Vivian was watching me from two seats away; wearing exactly the right expression for a woman sitting in a hospital at 2 AM after the death of her best friend.

But not a single tear on her face.

“Are you alright?” she asked.

I had watched Serena sob until she couldn’t breathe tonight. I had watched her fight four security guards screaming my name. I had watched her face when I said those words and I had told myself the pain in her eyes was guilt.

I had let them drag my girlfriend away like she was a stranger. 

I stood up.

“Killian?” Vivian rose with me. “Where are you going?”

“I need some air,” I said.

I walked out of the waiting room, stood in the hospital corridor alone and pressed my back against the cold wall and stared at the ceiling.

And that was when the first tear trickled down my cheek. 

Someone had murdered the woman I loved. 

And the only question in my mind — the one I could not shake, the one that was going to be my undoing — was figuring out whether she had died for something she actually did.

Or for something she never did at all.