Veronica’s POV

Veronica’s POV

The face in the mirror wasn’t mine.Dr. Reyes had warned me the swelling would take weeks to settle, that I shouldn’t judge the results until my face stopped looking like it belonged to a stranger who’d been in a fight.

She hadn’t mentioned how it would feel to look at that stranger every morning and find something like relief.

“Sophie Hale,” I said out loud, testing the name the way you test ice on a pond, waiting to see if it held. It did. Nothing in the reflection flinched.

Adrian knocked twice before letting himself in, a habit I’d come to recognize as his particular kind of courtesy, the kind that asked permission even when he already had it.

“The swelling’s going down,” he said, studying my face with the clinical distance of someone who’d spent his life around hospitals.

Then, softer, “You look well.”

“I look like someone else.”

“That was rather the point.”I almost smiled.

Three months of marriage to this man, three months of sharing a house and a name and nothing else, and I still hadn’t gotten used to the dry humor tucked under all that patience.

“How’s the treatment going?” he asked, settling into the chair across from my vanity like it was something he did every evening. It was, actually. I hadn’t noticed until just then.

“Dr. Reyes says my liver enzymes are stabilizing. Another few months and she thinks we can start tapering the worst of the symptoms.”

“Good.” He said it plainly, without the performance Caleb used to wrap around every kindness, like he needed me to notice how generous he was being.

Adrian just said good, and meant it, and moved on.

“I have something for you.” He set a folder on the vanity, the way he did most weeks now.

“Q3 shipping manifests from Caleb’s overseas accounts. There’s a pattern in here that matches the payroll records you found. Gonzalez wasn’t the only one on that list.”

I flipped it open and felt my stomach turn over, slow and cold, the way it always did when I saw how far the rot actually went.

“He’s been paying off two precinct captains for eleven years.”

“Eleven years.”

Adrian’s jaw tightened, just slightly, the only outward sign he gave when something actually reached him.

“We’ll fold it into the filing next month. Timed right, it’ll hit the same week as the shareholder vote."

We’d settled into this rhythm without ever discussing it. I found the cracks, he found the angle to widen them, and somewhere between his boardrooms and my stolen documents, Caleb’s empire had started coming apart at the seams without him ever noticing the seams were mine to begin with.

“Adrian.” I closed the folder, my fingers resting on the cover a beat longer than necessary.

“Thank you. For all of this.”

“You don’t have to thank me every time.”

“I know. I want to.”

Something shifted in his expression, there and gone so fast I might have imagined it, if I hadn’t spent three months learning the particular stillness that came over him whenever I said something he didn’t expect.

“Get some rest,” he said, standing. “The board meets Thursday, and I need you sharp for the calls after.”

He left the way he always did, without ceremony, and I sat there a while longer with the folder in my lap, thinking about how strange it was that the closest thing I had to safety these days was a man I’d married as a strategy.

Three weeks later, the strategy started paying out in earnest.

Moretti Holdings filed its first minority stake acquisition against Stanton Industries on a Tuesday morning, quiet and clean, the kind of move that wouldn’t raise alarms until the second and third followed.

I watched the stock ticker from Adrian’s office, my new face reflected faintly in the glass, and felt something unclench in my chest that had been wound tight since the night Caleb kicked me while I lay on the floor.Caleb, for his part, was too busy mourning his dead wife in the society pages to notice his company bleeding out from the inside. I’d seen the photos. Black suit, somber face, a hand resting protectively on Ava’s swollen belly at some charity gala, the picture of a grieving widower moving gracefully into his next chapter. The papers ate it up. Poor Caleb Stanton, losing his wife in that terrible fire, finding love again so soon, wasn’t it beautiful how life carried on.None of them knew what I knew.

That grief, on him, looked exactly like relief.Ava wasn’t faring as well. Adrian’s contact inside Moretti Hospital, the same hospital that had run my trial treatment, passed along updates I hadn’t asked for and couldn’t stop reading.

Her pregnancy had complicated whatever damage the repeated donor surgeries left behind. Her own doctor had flagged early signs of organ strain, the kind that would likely require a transplant of her own before the baby came to term.

I read the notes twice, waiting to feel something like satisfaction, and found only a strange, hollow quiet instead.

She had taken pieces of me without asking, without even the decency of telling me what I was losing, and now her body was demanding the same debt be paid, with no one left to pay it for her. I didn’t feel sorry for her. I wasn’t sure what I felt.

“You’ve gone quiet,” Adrian said from the doorway, watching me the way he did lately, like he was cataloguing something.

“Ava needs a transplant.”

He didn’t ask how I knew. He never did.

“Does that change anything?”

I thought about Avery’s small fists curling at her sides, about the scissors driving into the back of my hand, about two days I’d lost to a hospital bed no one had bothered to visit.

“No,” I said. “It changes nothing.”

But even as I said it, some old, tired part of me was already counting down the days until she understood exactly what she’d taken.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​