Chapter 9

A day later, in the top-floor conference room at Blake.

The emergency shareholder vote to remove Hunter Blake as CEO and heir passed unanimously.

He sat slumped in the chair at the head of the table, gray-faced, still fighting. He accused Whitmore and Frost of coordinating a short attack. He brought up the old engagement and asked the shareholders to keep faith in him.

Hayes dropped a thick audit report in the middle of the table. "Mr. Blake, this isn't a hostile grab. It's a lawful liquidation of pledged assets. You defaulted first, and there were false statements in your financing disclosures. Whitmore is taking back what belongs to it."

"That empire you were so proud of was a shell running on Whitmore's blood supply," I said from the other end of the table, watching the last of his pride come apart. "You thought you were some Wall Street genius. You were a parasite."

The papers were signed. Security came in and walked him out of the company he used to own — no title, no shares, nothing.

Blake collapsed, and everyone got what they had coming.

Sienna was sued by multiple parties for large-scale commercial fraud, defamation, and willful destruction of a high-value private collection. She sold every bag and every piece of jewelry she had and still couldn't cover the judgment. She's looking at a long stretch inside. The last time she made the news, she was trying to sneak into a charity gala for camera time and got stopped at the door like a piece of trash — while the screen behind her played a promo for the women's legal aid foundation my family established in my mother's name.

Hunter had nothing left. He became a stray on the Upper East Side.

He waited outside Whitmore headquarters every day, or on the street I take home. Cheap clothes, worn through, standing there like a beggar. He stopped asking for forgiveness. He'd just say, with red eyes, "Clara. For the sake of the last five years. One chance."

I stopped once and looked at him.

"When I forgot you, you called it a medical condition. Now that I remember, I know forgetting you was the clearest my head has ever been."

Then I walked past him with my security around me and never looked at him again. I didn't even give him an angry look. He was air.

That kind of nothing hurt him worse than anything I could've done on purpose.

...

A month later. A couture atelier in Paris.

I stood in front of a full-length mirror in the dress the Frost team had made for me.

The door opened. Adrian came up behind me in black tie.

He watched me in the mirror, and there was nothing cold in his face at all. Then the man Wall Street was afraid of got down on one knee.

He opened the velvet box. The blue diamond — the one whose setting had been snapped in half — had been reset, perfectly.

"Clara. Marry me." He looked up at me, took my hand, and slid it onto my finger.

I looked down and read the line engraved inside the band:

You were never hard to love.

I looked at the man who'd taken a burning beam for me, and who twelve years later was still standing between me and everything else, and I nodded.

...

That fall, New York got its wedding of the century.

St. Patrick's was full of white roses flown in for the day. In front of everyone who mattered in the city, I walked down the aisle toward the man who actually saved my life, and the only man I've ever loved.

Outside, the iron fence held the noise and the crowd back.

Hunter stood in the cold in torn clothes with both hands wrapped around the bars, looking through the gap at that flash of white inside.

He watched me walk toward his rival. He watched me smile a way I'd never smiled at him. And something in his chest gave out.

And in all that, he finally understood the cruelest part of it: I hadn't married Adrian to punish him. It wasn't a message. I really had forgotten him, and I really didn't love him.

Hunter spent all that time thinking I'd get tired and come back. Instead I didn't even leave him any hate. I bought his empire, and I bought my own life back, and I didn't look back once.