"I loathe you."
The words weren't screamed; they were whispered, a jagged serrated edge cutting through the sterile silence of the VIP corridor. Serena Ashford looked at Derek Faulkner with eyes that were hollow, devoid of the love that had sustained her through eight years of isolation. She had bitten her lip so hard it was bleeding, a crimson smear against her pale skin.
"Every day I spent waiting for you, every night I told Lemon Faulkner that her father was coming home to save us... I regret it all," she said, her voice trembling with the weight of a thousand shattered hopes. "I will never forgive you for this. Not in this life, and not in the next."
She turned away from him, pressing her face against the cold glass of the observation window. Inside the suite, her daughter—the only
