Lahat ng Kabanata ng He Betrayed Me at My Lowest. I Met Him at His Peak: Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 10

​The rain in Crestview didn’t just fall; it punished. It was a cold, rhythmic assault that turned the city’s soot-stained streets into a labyrinth of grey slush. It hammered against the cracked, salt-crusted windows of the bus station, mirroring the frantic, shattered rhythm of Elara Vance’s heart. Each drop sounded like a gavel striking a desk, pronouncing a sentence she wasn't ready to serve. ​In her trembling hand, she clutched two slips of paper that represented the total sum of her existence. One was a positive pregnancy test, the blue lines appearing like a cruel joke against the plastic; the other was a crumpled eviction notice, the ink bleeding into the cheap paper from the dampness of her palms. ​"He’ll help," she whispered, her voice a ghost of a sound that was immediately swallowed by the wind whistling through the station’s rafters. She looked at the empty, cold bench beside her, imagining Julian sitting there, his warm hand covering hers. "Julian loves me. He promised we

The boardroom meeting had been an exercise in prolonged, exquisite agony. For two grueling hours, Elara had felt Julian’s gaze like a physical weight, stripping away her carefully constructed professional layers. He wasn't looking at her blueprints; he was searching for the ruins of the girl he had once loved and eventually destroyed. Every time she spoke of load-bearing structures or glass-curtain walls, she could see him dissecting her voice, looking for a tremor that would prove she still felt the ghost of their past. ​The moment the meeting adjourned, Elara didn't wait for the customary handshakes or the polite, hollow pleasantries of the corporate elite. Her skin felt too tight for her body. She gathered her tablet and leather portfolio with trembling fingers and bolted for the exit, her heels clicking a frantic rhythm against the polished marble. She needed air—unfiltered, city air—and she needed to get back to the safety of the hotel suite where Leo was waiting. ​She reached

​The silence that followed Julian’s discovery wasn't peaceful; it was a deafening, pressurized void that felt like it might cause the windows of the apartment to shatter. Leo stood at the end of the hallway, his green dinosaur blanket trailing behind him like a royal cape, looking at the tall, formidable stranger with wide, curious eyes. The boy didn't know he was looking at his own ghost. Julian, meanwhile, looked at the child as if he were witnessing a miracle—or a haunting—manifested in flesh and blood. ​"Leo, honey, go back to bed. This is just... a business associate. We have to discuss some boring building plans," Elara said. Her voice was a fragile thread, trembling so violently she feared it would snap. ​Leo looked between them, his five-year-old intuition sensing the lightning in the room, but he was too exhausted by the fever to argue. He nodded sleepily and retreated into his room. The moment the bedroom door clicked shut, the atmosphere in the foyer shifted from shock

The next morning, the fragile peace of the North Wing wasn't broken by a shout or an alarm; it was shattered by the rhythmic, lethal clicking of expensive heels on the marble floors of the main hall. It was a sound Elara had heard in her nightmares for half a decade—the sound of a predator approaching. ​Beatrice Thorne had returned. ​Elara was in the sun-drenched breakfast room, a space of glass and white linen that felt far too cheerful for the storm that was brewing. She was focused on Leo, helping him cut his pancakes into the shape of stars, trying to maintain a semblance of normalcy. Then, the double doors swung open with a violent grace. ​Beatrice stood there, looking like an ice sculpture carved from a block of Chanel-scented arrogance. Her suit was a pale, clinical blue, and her hair was pulled back so tightly it seemed to sharpen the cruel lines of her face. She looked at Elara with a mixture of visceral disgust and genuine, wide-eyed shock. But when her gaze shifted dow

After Marcus left—following a tense standoff in the foyer that had left the air vibrating with unspoken threats—Elara found herself retreating to the master study. It was a room she usually avoided, a cavernous space of dark oak and the scent of old leather that felt like the inner sanctum of the Thorne ego. She was supposed to be reviewing the final blueprints for the North Wing’s expansion, but her mind was a whirlwind of conflicting emotions. The "One Month" deal felt like a countdown to a collision she wasn't sure she would survive. ​She sat at the massive desk, her hands trembling as she reached for a pen. She opened a velvet-lined drawer, expecting to find stationery. Instead, her eyes landed on a small, navy-blue box tucked away in the very back corner, as if it were a secret the room was trying to hide. ​Her breath hitched, the air turning into lead in her lungs. She knew that box. It was a relic of a ghost. It was the engagement ring Julian had shown her in a blurred, beau