All Chapters of HIS MISTRESS, MY REVENGE: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

84 Chapters

Chapter Sixty-One: The Day Lucas Moretti Was Arrested

I did not sleep badly that night.I had expected to. After the corridor and the question and the tears on his face and the walking away, I had expected my mind to run the whole evening on a loop until the small hours. But Sophia had been at the apartment when I got home, she had taken Noah after the event so Ethan and I could stay the full evening, and she was still there when we arrived, sitting on the sofa with her shoes off and a cup of tea and the expression of someone who had put Noah to bed and was waiting to hear everything.I told her everything.The corridor. Damien's eyes finding Noah first. The tears gathering before he had even spoken. The question. Walking away.Sophia listened to every word without interrupting.When I finished she was quiet for a moment.Then she said: "Good."Just that. One word. And it was the most complete response she could have given.I slept well.Woke at six to the alarm. Lay in the grey morning for a moment taking stock of the day before it bega

Chapter Sixty-Two: The Board Makes an Offer

The champagne glasses were still on the draining rack when Olivia called.Three days after Lucas's arrest. Three days after Sophia had arrived with the good bottle and Noah had raised his orange juice with solemn ceremony and we had said it was worth it and meant every word. The kitchen had been washed and tidied and Monday had arrived with its ordinary requirements and I was at my desk reviewing the Milan supply chain figures when Olivia's name appeared on my screen."The Sinclair Group board met this morning," she said. "Emergency session. Without Damien." A pause that lasted exactly as long as it needed to. "They sent a formal letter to A.C. Holdings twenty minutes ago. It is in your inbox."I closed the Milan file.Opened my email.The letter was three pages. I read the first page. The second. By the third I had stopped reading with my professional mind and had started reading with the part of me that had been paying attention to the full shape of this story for six years.They we

Chapter Sixty-Three: The Decision

I woke up at five-thirteen.Not because of an alarm. Not because Noah had appeared at the doorway with a question about whether sourdough was technically a vegetable (that had been last Tuesday, and the answer was still no). I woke up because my mind had finished processing everything it needed to process and had decided, apparently, that five-thirteen in the morning was a perfectly reasonable time to present its conclusions.I lay in the dark for a moment.Then I picked up my phone, opened my email, and read the letter one more time.Same three pages. Same offer. Same title sitting at the top of it like a dare.I put the phone face-down on the pillow.And I knew.I had known since the kitchen last night, if I was being honest with myself, which I had learned over the past seven years was always the better option. The lying to yourself thing was exhausting and expensive and I had given it up sometime around the second year of building Lumière from a concept paper and a jar of saved ti

Chapter Sixty-Four: Damien Finds Out

(Damien's POV)Weeks after the midnight call with Nathan and I was still lying to myself.Not badly. Not obviously. I had gotten quite good at it by this point, the specific quiet dishonesty of telling yourself you are fine when fine is nowhere in the building. I showered. I answered emails. I sat at the desk in the apartment I had been working from since the suspension and I moved things around on screens and pretended that counted as functioning. Some days I even believed it for a few hours. Those were the better days.Today was not one of those days.I had been awake since. Not productively awake, not the kind of awake where you get things done before the city catches up with you. Just awake. Lying in the dark with the ceiling above me and my mind doing its thing, the same circuit it had been running for weeks. Noah. The four pages in my drawer that had become six. The midnight call with Nathan and what he had said: she is more generous than you deserve. The correct understanding t

Chapter Sixty-Five: The Depression Diagnosis

I did not sleep.Not even close.Nathan left just after nine and I stood in the kitchen for a long time after the door closed, looking at the two containers still on the table and the phone I had put face-down after the call with Dr. Webb and the specific silence of an apartment that had just had two people in it and now had one again. I washed up. Not because I particularly wanted clean containers but because I needed something to do with my hands while my mind continued doing what it had been doing all evening, turning everything over and over like a stone it could not put down.The tears had dried by then. What replaced them was not better. Just quieter. The specific hollow feeling of a man who had cried and called his doctor and eaten food he did not taste and was now standing at a sink at nine-fifteen at night with absolutely nowhere to put any of what he was feeling.I went to bed at ten.Lay there until eleven. Midnight. Half past.At some point I stopped watching the clock bec

Chapter Sixty-Six: Vanessa's Final Vicious Attack

Vanessa's lawyer called on a Wednesday.The sentencing was Thursday morning. She was requesting a final meeting. No lawyers in the room. No mediators. Just the two of them, one last time, and she had something she needed to say before the court took away the last of her choices about where she was and what she was doing.Nathan told me not to go.He said it plainly, the way he said the things he needed me to actually hear, not as advice wrapped in softness but as a direct statement from a man who had watched me make enough poor decisions to know the shape of one when he saw it approaching. "She has nothing left to lose, Damien. A person with nothing left to lose is not coming to that room to make peace. Do not go."I heard him.I went anyway.Because I still believed, even then, even after everything, that people deserved the chance to say what they needed to say. That sitting across from someone and receiving whatever they had to give, even if it was ugly, even if it cost you somethi

Chapter Sixty-Seven: What Nathan Said After

Nathan was standing in the corridor when I walked out.Not pacing. Not on his phone. Just standing there with his back against the wall and his arms folded and the expression of a man who had told you not to do something, watched you do it anyway, and had then come to the building regardless and waited in the corridor for however long it took because that was who he was.I stopped when I saw him.He looked at my face.Said nothing.We walked outside together. The afternoon had turned cold while I was in that room, the kind of cold that arrived quietly in the early evening without announcing itself, and the street outside the legal firm was doing its ordinary thing, people moving past with their coats pulled close and their minds entirely elsewhere, nobody paying any attention to two men standing on the pavement with the weight of a forty minute room still sitting between them.Nathan did not ask how it went.He had read the answer off my face in the corridor.We found a bench. One of

Chapter Sixty-Eight: Beatrice Falls

I got home from Nathan just after nine and went straight to the drawer.Not to eat. Not to shower. Not to do any of the ordinary things a man did at the end of a day that had taken that much out of him. I sat at the kitchen table in my coat and I pulled the six pages out and I read them from the beginning the way I always did, slowly, not skipping anything, not rushing toward the parts I had written most recently. All six pages. Every word I had chosen and the ones I had crossed out and come back to. I read them and I thought about what Vanessa had said in that conference room and what Nathan had said on the bench outside and I sat inside all of it without trying to resolve it into something tidier than it was.By the time I put the pages back it was past midnight.I did not sleep again that night. Not properly. I lay in the dark and the city did its quiet hours outside the window and my mind did what it had been doing for weeks, the same circuit, Noah and the pages and the work and w

Chapter Sixty-Nine: Beatrice Falls Ill (PT. 2)

"Tell her I am still sorry. Whatever it means at this point, whatever she does with it, I need her to know I have not stopped."Something shifted in my chest.Not softly."Mother," I said."I know she may not want to hear it," she said. "I know what I did. I have had a great deal of time recently to understand what I did and why and how completely unforgivable most of it was. But I need her to know."I looked at her.At the monitors. At the IV. At the woman who had raised me and shaped me and in doing so had handed me some of the worst parts of myself on a silver platter and called it preparation for the world.And something that had been sitting in me since the bench outside the legal firm with Nathan, since Vanessa's words in the conference room, since forty minutes alone in a cold chair with the truth arranged in front of me like evidence, something rose up in me that I had not planned and did not entirely stop."She may not want to hear it," I said. My voice was quieter than I exp

Chapter Seventy: Amelia Does Not Go

(Amelia's POV)Days after the board accepted my counter and life had simply continued.Which was the thing nobody told you about winning. It did not stop the world and play music. It just let you get on with it. The Milan figures. The Paris expansion. Olivia appearing at my office door every morning with the briefing and that particular expression she wore when the day was going to require a lot from both of us and she had already prepared for it and was waiting for me to catch up.Noah's volcano was still on the kitchen table.Four days now. Red paint. Papier-mache. An ongoing argument with Ethan about whether lava was orange or red that had no resolution in sight and which both of them were clearly enjoying far more than the actual project. I had come home Wednesday evening to find them elbow-deep in paint and completely unbothered and I had stood in the doorway thinking this. Just this. This kitchen and these two people and this ridiculous volcano.It was enough.It was everything.

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