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Chapter 2

Penulis: Lovelicious
Being loved by Helena Ashbourne was the closest thing to a superpower I had back in school, and I was proud of it.

The year I turned fifteen, the Sloane family went bankrupt and both my parents died.

The rich boys who used to flatter me cornered me outside the school gate and laughed while they tore at my uniform.

It was sixteen-year-old Helena who showed up with a crowd of bodyguards and shoved them aside, her face like ice.

The sunset that day was red as blood.

She shouted at me.

"Come here!

"Gabriel! Don't be scared! Get behind me!"

By the time I stumbled over to her, that proud face of hers was full of pain for me.

The way she looked at me burned, close to scalding.

"Gabriel, don't be scared. You've still got me."

She brushed the tears from the corner of my eye, and the warmth of her fingers stayed on my skin.

It burned. It burned enough to make me want to cry.

"Gabriel, I, Helena Ashbourne, will never lie to you as long as I live, and I will be loyal to you always."

The girl's promise landed like a struck bell, and it left my chest shaking.

What I didn't understand then was that a promise is only sincere in the second it's spoken.

By the second year of our marriage, that love had been ground down to nothing in the bottomless debt the Sloanes left behind.

She spent nearly her whole fortune on it.

The heat was gone from the way she looked at me. All that was left was an exhaustion I couldn't see the bottom of.

When the long memory finally let me go, my head was clearer than it had been in a while.

Today was our fifth wedding anniversary.

I put on the white suit she'd always loved and waited from sunset until the middle of the night.

No flowers. No embrace.

Just a cold, empty house and the noise of the Ashbourne Holdings gala streaming on my phone.

Out of that whole crowd, I found her in a second.

She was smiling softly while Damon Cross carefully fastened a necklace around her throat.

The camera pushed in. The pendant was a star and a crescent moon.

A star set with tiny diamonds, curved around the silver crescent at its center.

My breath stopped.

I'd drawn that design in my sketchbook the year I was fifteen.

The day Helena confessed to me, she pointed at that sheet of paper, her voice shaking so badly it barely held together.

"Gabriel, when I've got money someday, I'm going to have this made for you.

"Stars never lie to the moon.

"And I'll never break my word to you."

Well, she'd had it made.

She'd just let another man be the one to fasten it around her neck.

On the screen, Helena touched the pendant at her collarbone and smiled shyly.

"Thank you, Damon. It's the most special gift anyone's ever given me."

Helena didn't say anything else.

But the way she looked at Damon was indulgent past all reason.

I'd only ever seen that look on her face when she was sixteen.

After that, I never saw her smile like that again.

So stars fall too.

And even the moon gets abandoned.

Before I could get my breath back, the gala moved into its charity auction.

The host announced the next lot from the stage in a booming voice.

"Next up, the controlling interest in the Sloane Family Foundation."

The numbers on the screen kept climbing, and panic took me.

My fingers shook so badly I could hardly hold the phone as I called Helena's number over and over.

The second she picked up, I heard myself begging, with nothing left of my pride.

"Helena, I accept that you don't love me anymore. I'll give you the divorce.

"Just help me one more time. That foundation is the last thing my parents left me. I only want..."

There was a short silence on the other end, and then she spoke slowly.

"Gabriel, haven't I helped you enough already?"

I was still trying to say something when the line went dead.

On the stream, the auctioneer's gavel came down hard.

"Sold to Cross Angel Ventures for thirty million dollars!"

The camera cut to Helena in the audience.

She calmly raised her glass toward Damon from across the room.

The light caught her brow, elegant and cold.

The last thing my parents left me, sold off just to make Damon smile.

I didn't scream. I couldn't even cry.

Something packed itself into my chest until I couldn't breathe, and it tore out of me as a cough.

The taste of blood rose in my throat.

I sat down hard on the floor and looked quietly at the streak of red on it.

Helena, you really are ruthless.

As the last of my hope burned out, the girl's voice came from beside me again.

She looked more frightened than I was, and her voice was urgent.

"Gabriel! Go! Don't look back!

"Leave her! I don't want to watch you hurting over her."

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  • The Promise She Broke   Chapter 10

    Winter in Mist Harbor always came with more rain than anything else.There was none of Crownstead's gilded excess here, and none of the gossip that used to choke me.I had on a heavy cream cashmere coat, and I was carrying a bunch of chamomile I'd just picked up at the market.The flowers were small and beaded with rain, and they matched the way I felt.A mild kind of quiet.I walked into an old tavern at the end of a lane.There was a fire going in the hearth, oak crackling under the sound of a slow fiddle, and the warmth wrapped around me the second I was through the door.I breathed it deep into my lungs and felt a little more of the cold that used to live in my bones get pushed out.There was a time my hands shook too hard to hold a fork. Now I was greeting the round little owner like I'd done it a hundred times."The usual. Hot milk, no sugar."Nora Kessler handed it over with a smile and mentioned it in passing."By the way, that woman from Crownstead came by again tod

  • The Promise She Broke   Chapter 9

    The air went dead for a full half minute.Celia shut her eyes, pulled in a long breath, and finally, reluctantly, took half a step back.She pulled away from Helena's still-shaking hand with open disgust."You are pathetic, Helena."The brutality had gone out of Celia's voice. What was left came out flat."Now you know what pain is? Now you know what regret is?"When he was begging you in that psychiatric hospital to let him go, what were you doing?"Helena shook all over, and the tears wouldn't stop coming."I was wrong. I know I was wrong, I really do..."Celia looked at her coldly and took another breath."I brought you here to die today."I'd already had the hole dug to put you in."Helena's head came up fast, her eyes hollow.Celia paused, and something very complicated came into her voice."But my brother said..."He said to leave you alive."The second she said it, a flare of hope came up in Helena's eyes."Gabriel still cares about me, doesn't he? He couldn't s

  • The Promise She Broke   Chapter 8

    Crownstead's world changed overnight.Helena Ashbourne, the famous head of Ashbourne Holdings, vanished out of her own heavily guarded home.There was no ransom call and no ransom note.There was only one chilling rumor circulating inside Ashbourne Holdings: this had come from somewhere above them, and nothing could be done about it.An invisible hand had wiped away every trace of Helena and hadn't broken a sweat doing it....When Helena woke up, she was looking at an abandoned old building.The paint was peeling off the walls, and a cold wind blew through the rooms carrying the first real cold of fall."Awake?"A frigid voice came out of the empty space.Helena couldn't move. Her arms had been tied behind the chair.She struggled to lift her head and, against the light, made out the woman standing in the shadows.She was young, in a black trench coat.The instant Helena saw her face, her pupils contracted.The eyes, the bones of her face, they might as well have come ou

  • The Promise She Broke   Chapter 7

    Helena stood in the middle of the empty living room and looked around.Not one thing in the house had changed, and yet the place felt terrifyingly hollow.Every light was burning, and none of it reached the black hole at the bottom of her."Gabriel?"She tried calling his name.Nobody answered.Only the echo came back off the cold walls, and the emptiness of it was frightening.Days of holding everything in, of wearing herself down to nothing, came over her all at once, tangled up with the strange fragility and ache of being pregnant.Helena stumbled over to the liquor cabinet, looking for something to steady the churn inside her, but there was no strength left in her fingers. She had barely touched the bottle on the shelf when her arm swung wide and the bottle came down hard against the marble counter, and the liquor poured out across it.She couldn't hold herself up any longer. Her back slid down the cold face of the cabinet until she was sitting limp on the floor, holding w

  • The Promise She Broke   Chapter 6

    It was the third day since Gabriel disappeared.Helena had nearly turned all of Crownstead upside down looking for him.She pulled every connection the Ashbournes had and burned through enormous favors to get lawful checks run on the transportation systems.Airports, rail terminals, highway exits, even every camera around the psychiatric facility from that night.There wasn't a single record of him anywhere.The man the black-clad team had carried out was like a drop of water going into the ocean. He was gone without a trace.Only then did the fear finally catch up with her and set her heart pounding.It was as though somebody had cut a piece out of it while she was still alive and left a hole that wouldn't stop bleeding.In her office, the skin under Helena's eyes had gone dark, the careful makeup was long since ruined, and her hair hung loose and tangled.She paced back and forth like an animal caged and going out of its mind."Ms. Ashbourne, we still... can't find anything

  • The Promise She Broke   Chapter 5

    As the dust cleared, the corridor lights sputtered twice.Then they settled back into a dead, sickly white.The girl's apparition, who a second earlier had carried enough fury to level the building, went transparent the instant she crossed the threshold.Like a handful of sand nobody could hold on to, she scattered slowly and finally sank, gently, into Gabriel Sloane's body.Helena stood frozen, her pupils blowing wide.A suffocating emptiness was still lodged in her throat.But there was no one in front of her, only Gabriel, unconscious on the floor.Only that badly warped iron door, hanging off its frame and ready to fall."That... that student in the school uniform. Did you see her?"Helena's voice shook, and she grabbed Damon's arm and wouldn't let go.Damon had already gone white with terror. He fought his way out of her grip, close to tears."What student? Helena, have you lost your mind?"That door blew open by itself! This place is cursed. I'm getting out of here."

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