Chapter 7

The cheating Fiancé

Meanwhile, back at the banquet.

Gabriell watched Miaelle disappear through the doors and something in his chest pulled tight. I should go after her—he thought. His feet even shifted toward the exit before he stopped himself, catching sight of the room still watching him, waiting to see what he’d do next.

He realized then, that he couldn’t. Not now. Not with Mia’s hand still resting where he’d left it, and the promotion still one careful step from being locked down. He’d spent four years getting here — sleepless nights, missed dinners, favors called in and owed back twice over. He wasn’t about to let one scene, however ugly, undo any of it.

Lightning split the sky outside, throwing a white flash across the glass wall behind them.

“Do you think she’ll be okay out there?” Mia asked, voice soft, eyes wide in a way that portrayed her feigned concern well.

He shrugged. “She’ll come back. She’s not going to get far.” He scoffed. “Besides, she can’t let go of me that easily.”

Something flickered across Mia’s face —a devious smirk, there and gone before he turned to get a proper look at her. Had he seen it, he could’ve suspected that maybe Mia isn’t who she claimed to be.

He however, was too busy running through whether Miaelle would actually be fine walking home in a storm like this and whether he even cared enough to check.

He decided he wouldn’t chase her. Chasing implied she mattered enough to chase. Better to let her come crawling back on her own, humbled, ready to apologize for the scene she’d caused on what was supposed to be his night.

Maybe he’d let her sweat first, leave her calls unanswered for a day or two. Make her earn her way back into being tolerated. It wouldn’t take long. It never did with her.

He took Mia’s hand and walked her toward the far side of the room, where the whispers were still thick enough to taste.

“Do something,” Mia murmured, low enough for only him to hear.

He crossed to the nearest table, picked up a champagne flute and a fork, and made his way to the microphone stand near the band. The ring of metal against crystal cut through the room in short, deliberate strokes until conversation died down and every face turned toward him.

“May I have your attention, please.” He let the silence stretch a beat before continuing. “I apologize for the scene earlier. It’s unfortunate what happens when an employee reads a bit too much into simple kindness. I want to assure you all — she is nothing more than staff. I’ll see the matter handled properly by tomorrow.”

A woman near the front tilted her head, unbothered by the room’s collective discomfort. “Will you be firing her?”

Mia stepped in before he could answer, her hand light on his arm, her voice pitched for maximum sympathy. “Oh, no. Gabriell’s far too kind for that. If he let her go, she’d have nothing. No income, nowhere left to go. We couldn’t do that to her.”

A ripple of approval moved through the crowd — murmurs of how generous, how gracious, a few scattered claps.

Gabriell inclined his head like a man accepting praise he’d earned. He and Mia stepped back from the podium to a small round of applause neither of them had technically asked for but appreciated nonetheless.

Before they’d fully rejoined the crowd, he checked his watch, pulled out his phone, and typed a short message.

“It’s time.”

He hit send, pocketed the phone, and returned to the microphone.

“There’s actually one more thing,” he said, and the room’s attention snapped back to him instantly, hungry for anything that might follow the spectacle from earlier. After all, even the elite weren’t above good gossip.

He reached out for Mia’s hand and drew her gently to his side.

“Four years ago, I walked into a room not unlike this one and met the person who’s stood beside me through every late night, every setback, every impossible deadline this promotion demanded.”

He wasn’t lying, exactly. He’d simply left out whose room, and whose hand had actually held his through most of those nights.

He dropped to one knee.

Lightning cracked outside again, closer this time, whitening the glass wall for a full second before the thunder caught up. For half a heartbeat, unbidden, Miaelle’s face flashed behind his eyes — not the way she’d looked tonight, but the way she’d looked the first time he’d told her he loved her.

A cold thought slid through him what if she’s not okay out there and something happened? He shoved it down, plastering his expression back into something proposal-ready, and looked up at Mia instead.

A collective gasp swept the ballroom, someone near the back audibly clasped a hand over their mouth. Mia’s own hand flew to her lips, eyes glassy under the chandelier light, genuine shock breaking through the composure she usually wore so well.

From his jacket pocket he produced a ring — a single, sizable diamond set in platinum, the kind of stone that caught every point of light in the room and threw it back tenfold.

“Mia Beaumont. You have never once asked me to be anything other than exactly who I am. You’ve believed in this—” he gestured vaguely at the room, the title, the whole gleaming architecture of his ambition, “—since before anyone else did. I don’t want to build any of it without you standing next to me.”

He held the ring up between them. “Marry me?”

Mia stared down at him, one hand still pressed to her mouth, and for a moment she looked almost like she hadn’t planned for this exact instant, like this wasn’t precisely the outcome she’d spent months quietly engineering.

“So?” he prompted, the ghost of a smile at the corner of his mouth.

“Yes.” Then louder, arms flinging around his neck as he rose to meet her. “Yes!”

The ballroom erupted in cheers and scattered applause, although, not everyone joined in. A cluster near the windows exchanged looks that weren’t nearly as celebratory, murmuring behind champagne glasses about the woman who’d fled into the storm twenty minutes earlier. But their voices were lost under the noise.

Phones rose across the room, cameras flashing in quick, overlapping bursts, capturing Gabriell slipping the ring onto Mia’s finger, her laughing through visible tears, capturing the whole polished, perfect image of two people who had, apparently, only ever wanted each other.

Somewhere in the middle of it, Gabriell’s eyes drifted to the ballroom doors. Just a glance. Then another, a few minutes later, while Mia was busy showing off the ring to a cluster of women.

He kept catching himself doing it — checking the entrance, half expecting it to swing open, to see Miaelle standing there again drenched and desperate for his love and affection.

It never opened.

Mia noticed too. She noticed the second time, and the third. She said nothing about it, not with half the room’s cameras still trained on them.