All Chapters of HIS MISTRESS, MY REVENGE: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

167 Chapters

Chapter Forty-One: The Weight of What She Built

She stood up.Walked to the window. Stood with her back to the room for a long moment with one hand pressed flat against the glass and the garden dark beyond it and the city beyond that, going about its night entirely indifferent to what was happening in this sitting room.Then she turned.Her voice when she spoke was the quietest I had ever heard it. Stripped of every layer of the woman who ran rooms and made decisions and told people what their lives were supposed to look like."I did that," she said. "I want you to understand that. I did that to her. Not you alone. Me." Her eyes were very bright. "I am the one who went to work on that marriage. I am the one who decided she was not enough. I am the one who produced her medical file at a dinner table and read it out loud and watched her sit there with nothing to protect her." Her voice cracked. "I told you to let her go. I told you Vanessa was carrying your future. I convinced you. I helped plan the whole thing. I sat across from tha

Chapter Forty-Two: The Leak Has a Name

I stopped at a pharmacy on the way home.Not something I had ever done before. I had never been the kind of man who needed help sleeping, had always considered it a point of quiet pride that my body did what it was told when it was told to do it. The pharmacist asked no questions. I took the recommended dose in the car park before I drove home.It did not work.I lay in the dark and felt everything just as clearly as I had felt it in the hospital car park, the results, Vanessa's hands over her mouth, the step back, Ella's photograph, my mother's shoulders shaking, Harold's voice saying you chose the convenient thing every single time, four pages written to a boy who did not know I existed. All of it moving through me on a loop that the medication could not interrupt. It softened the edges slightly. That was all. The thing underneath the edges did not soften at all.By eight I was at the kitchen table.I looked like what I was. A man who had not slept. Who was running on the specific

Chapter Forty-Three: The Man She Had Never Seen

(Amelia’s POV)It had been three days since Olivia attended the Sinclair Group board session on my behalf.She had come back that day with the measured expression she wore when something significant had happened that she was still processing and had given me the summary efficiently and without drama. Damien had left mid-session. His phone had rung and he had looked at it and stood up and walked out without explanation. Nathan had continued. The room had felt the absence of it for the rest of the morning.I had filed that information away and gone back to work.Three days later she appeared in my doorway again. Same measured expression. Different information."Nathan called," she said. "Emergency session. Tomorrow morning. Nine o'clock. Full board. Every member." She held my gaze. "He specifically requested A.C. Holdings' representation."I thought about the investigation report that had been moving through the financial press since morning. The leak. Vanessa's name. Lucas Moretti. The

Chapter Forty-Four: The Cost of Not stopping.

(Damien's POV)Walked to the elevator.Pressed the button for the car park. Stood in the elevator and looked at my own reflection in the steel doors for twelve floors and did not recognise the man looking back at me, not because he had changed, but because I was only now seeing him clearly for the first time.got to my car.Got in.And I should not have been driving.I knew it the moment I sat down. I knew it the way you know things when you are exhausted and hollowed out and have just spent two hours in a boardroom being honest in ways that left you with nothing left to hold yourself upright with. I knew it and I got in anyway because the alternative was sitting in the Sinclair Group car park and I had already done enough sitting in car parks recently to last me a considerable while.The city was doing its afternoon thing. Traffic and noise and everyone going somewhere with the specific purposeful urgency of people who knew exactly where they were headed and why. I pulled out of the

Chapter Forty-Five: The Room Where Nothing Could Be Managed

I called the number on a Wednesday morning.Not immediately. The piece of paper had sat on my bedside table for four days, which was how long it took me to stop finding reasons why today was not the right day. Too much happening at the company. The regulatory submission needed reviewing. Nathan had three things requiring my attention. All of it true. None of it the real reason.The real reason was that I had spent forty years being a man who did not need this kind of help and the distance between that man and the one sitting in a hospital bay with elevated blood pressure and a crumpled front panel was still something I was working to cross.On the fifth morning I picked up the phone before I could think about it properly.His name was Dr. Marcus Webb. His assistant scheduled me for Thursday at eleven. She was matter of fact about it, no special tone, no careful gentleness, just an appointment being made the way appointments were made, which was exactly the right way to handle it.The

Chapter Forty-Six: The Word She Said Without Knowing

I filled the prescription on Friday evening.The pharmacy was three streets from Dr. Webb's office and I went there directly after the session while everything was still sitting close to the surface and before I had time to talk myself out of it. The pharmacist handed me the bag without ceremony. I drove home. Put the medication on the bedside table. Lay in the dark.This time I slept.Not immediately. Not without difficulty. But somewhere in the small hours my body finally decided it had been given enough support to stop fighting itself and I went under properly and I did not surface until seven in the morning when the light was already coming through the curtains with the specific unhurried confidence of a Saturday.I lay there for a moment.Then I got up. Made coffee. And decided today was the day I stopped waiting for the right day to go to the hospital.I went on a Saturday morning.Not because it was convenient. Because I had been trying to go since Tuesday and every morning I h

Chapter Forty-Seven: The Word She Said Without Knowing (Part Two)

I stepped into the corridor.Vanessa was still there.She had not left. She was sitting in the plastic chair outside the room with her hands in her lap and her face arranged into the specific expression of someone who has been waiting and has prepared several versions of what they are going to say and is now running through which one is most appropriate.She stood up when she saw me."Damien," she said. "I just want to say--""I did not come here for you."The words came out flat and final and completely without heat because the heat had been replaced by something colder and more total than anger."I came here for her," I said. "Only for her. So whatever you have been sitting in that chair rehearsing since this morning you can keep it because I have nothing for you. Not today. Not in this corridor."She opened her mouth."Do not," I said.She closed it.I looked at her. And something that had been building since the waiting room and the step back and the car park and forty minutes wit

Chapter Forty-Eight: The Night the Tabloids Found Out

I got home at half past seven.Both hands on the wheel the whole way, the way I had promised myself in the hospital car park, the way I had been doing since the accident, because apparently that was what accountability looked like in its most basic form, paying attention to the road, doing the small things correctly, building from the ground up.I made something to eat that I did not taste. Took the medication. Sat on the edge of my bed and looked at the room for a while, this room that had been rearranged by a woman I now understood had never truly loved me, the curtains she had chosen and the furniture she had positioned and the specific version of domesticity she had constructed around me like a set that had been dressed by someone who knew what the scene was supposed to look like without caring what was actually happening inside it.I lay down.The medication did its quiet work at the edges. I felt sleep beginning to arrive the way it had been arriving more reliably these past few

Chapter Forty-Nine: Amelia Doesn't Celebrate

(Amelia’s POV)Olivia sent a link at six twelve in the morning.No message. Just a link. Which from Olivia at six twelve in the morning meant she had been awake for at least an hour, had seen it, had read it properly, and had decided that the kindest thing was to make sure I saw it from her before I stumbled across it anywhere else.I was already awake.Not because I had been waiting for anything. Because Noah had a school project due and had remembered this at ten the previous night and we had spent forty-five minutes at the kitchen table doing what we probably should have started three days earlier and by the time he was in bed and I was in mine my brain had decided it was done with sleep for the evening.I was lying in the dark when the notification came.I opened the link.SINCLAIR HEIR NOT SINCLAIR'S.I read the headline twice. Then the subheading. Then the first four paragraphs which were enough to tell me that whoever had put this together had done it with complete documentatio

Chapter Fifty: She Walked In and the Room Stopped

We arrived at eleven.Not ten fifty-eight. Not eleven-oh-two. Eleven exactly. The kind of punctuality that is not about being on time but about being precisely where you decided to be at precisely the moment you decided to be there, which is an entirely different thing and everyone in that building felt the difference the moment we stepped out of the elevator.Ethan was on my left. Sophia behind us with her coat over her arm and the expression she wore when she was enjoying something and had decided not to hide it. My legal team behind her. Olivia at the back with her notebook already open.The receptionist on the forty-second floor looked up when we came through the glass doors. Looked at the group of us. Looked at me specifically."Ms. Carter," she said. "The session has been running since nine. Mr. Cole asked me to let you know they are ready for you whenever you arrive.""Thank you," I said. "We are ready now."She picked up her phone.I looked at Ethan. He straightened the lapel

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