CHAPTER 004
1327 Words
CHAPTER 004
AMELIA’S POV
After the banquet, the silence that cloaked my flat was so dense it bore down on my chest. I banged the door shut behind me and leaned into it, struggling to draw in air. It wasn’t the long walk home or the stilettos gouging my feet—it was the lingering weight of the night that still pressed against me. Their laughter still echoed in my head, merciless and sharp, rattling around like shards of broken glass.
Why did you let them walk all over me? Adrian, why did you just sit there?
I ripped my earrings from their lobes and flung them onto the counter, the muted clink too puny for the tempest raging inside me. The clutch fell from my grasp and slid across the couch, spewing papers—work notes, reminders, unfinished scribbles. I slid down beside the papers, looking without seeing, my breath weighted. I lifted one of the notes, read the words unseeingly, and let it slide from my hand.
I’m not going to cry. Not for them. Not for him.
Still, the tears slipped out. Hot. Relentless. I rubbed them away with the backs of my hands, head shaking with each stroke.
They want me to break. They’ve been trying to make me fold, trying to make me walk away,” I told the empty flat. They won’t get that from me.
Outside, the city kept moving on without me. Cars purred off in the distance, a drunken voice rose from somewhere down the street, yet I remained here, an invisible speck in the shadows of my own living room. A shadowy reflection in the window met my gaze: a girl with swollen eyes, her shoulders folded in, wearing a dress far too fine for a place so modest.
I loathed that reflection.
The week that came after pulled me through fire. Work swallowed me up, or perhaps I swallowed myself in work to keep from thinking. Deadlines towered above my coffee cups, and the newsroom crackled with noise and clatter, yet in the hush that came when everyone else had left and the printer’s hum was my only companion, it all came back to me.
That table. Those faces. Those smiles, the teeth behind them.
And him. Sitting still. Eyes down. The hush of his silence was more deafening than their taunts.
The more I dwelt on it, the hotter it blistered. Yet beneath the flames, an even deeper pain smoldered. Hurt that settled deep, heavy, immovable.
One night, when the office lay silent and the clock crept past midnight, a soft shuffling slid beneath my door. The sound was muted, as though a sheet of paper were dragging across the floor. My chest closed in on itself.
I turned.
An envelope.
No name. No address. Just thick, heavy, waiting.
I lifted it, as though it were ready to burst. The tips of my fingers quivered as I ripped the envelope apart.
Files.
Contracts. Bank accounts. Paper after paper crammed with figures and signatures. My eyes raced, my mind lagging behind, until I saw it.
Blackwood.
I froze. The name sprang from the paper as though a spark had ignited bone-dry wood. A thud caught in my lungs, my pulse thundered.
No… this isn’t real.
Yet the longer I read, the worse things became. Bribes. Fake accounts. The money was shunted into the dark. Each page was hammered in another nail. Their empire wasn’t nearly as pristine, as invulnerable, as they appeared to make it.
The room grew hotter. My hands shook.
This is dynamite.
I let the papers slide onto the desk as though they seared my hands. Backed away. I stared at them, my chest heaving up and down far too quickly. Yet something inside me gave way, and I stepped forward again, turning the pages with mounting speed, as greed and horror warred within my veins.
“This could destroy them,” I breathed, the words ripping across my throat.
Yet an even stronger thought reared up behind it.
It could wreck him, too.
I laid my palm over my mouth. Adrian’s face crowded my thoughts—the quiet, the contempt, the keen edge of him, and under it all, the look he once gave me that told me I wasn’t just anyone.
I hated that he continued to live inside me like this.
I ought to have felt powerful. I ought to have felt capable of crushing them or crushing him. Instead, a tightness knotted my stomach, and my chest weighed down with a pain I didn’t want.
Would he even care if I did it? If I did it, would he fight? Could he ever stop hating me?
The clock’s ticking was far too loud. I pushed the papers into a folder, slid it into my desk drawer, and locked it. I couldn’t keep looking. Not now. Not with my head this raw.
Yet even stashed away, I still could not turn it off.
If I use this, I rise higher. No one will ever laugh at me again.
If I use this, I set him ablaze as well.
After that, sleep rarely came. But when it did, it crept in rough and shadowed. I dreamed that fire engulfed the Blackwood name, and Adrian’s icy gaze fixed on me as the blaze licked higher. I opened my eyes, soaked in sweat, my sheets wound tight around me, my chest burning.
The ringing of my phone jerked me from one of those nights.
I sighed, turning over, anticipating a spam call, a late-night alert anything but
Adrian.
His name shone on the ebony surface of the screen. My breath caught.
No. Not now. Not now.
The phone kept buzzing. Growing louder, lingering longer, the vibration filled the room with a scream. I watched until my hand slid of its own accord, swiping to answer.
“Hello?” My voice broke.
A pause of one beat. Then, his voice was bare.
“Amelia… I have to see you.
I sat up, the world tilting. The tone of his voice was anything but smooth or smug. It was unfiltered, cracks coursing through parts of him I’d never seen before.
“Now?” “What?”
“Yes.” He released the word on a breath. “Please.”
The tone of it undid me; it didn’t sound like a man clamoring for dominance; it sounded as though he’d already lost it.
Yet their faces came back to me. I heard their laughter. The s***h of his silence cut through that table.
“You think you can simply call me, after that?” I cut myself off, my voice edging.
He made no protest. He made no protest. Just silence.
That silence terrified me more than words.
I turned my gaze to the drawer, locked tight. I felt the papers inside the drawer almost murmuring. My weapon. My exit. My path up.
My chest ached.
If I run into you,” I murmured, my words meant for me alone, “what face will I wear?” The woman who loved you or the one who can destroy you?
The line fell silent. I wondered if he’d hung up.
I heard him draw in a breath. A shaky breath, as if he even questioned the answer himself.
I broke the call first. I watched my hand quiver as I laid the phone down.
The room seemed claustrophobic. The walls came to press against me. My pulse roared in my ears.
I couldn’t keep still. My feet kept time with my breaths, my arms tight around myself, each step more difficult than the one before. His voice clung, raking my ribs. Sitting there, the folder hummed with power, with a sense of danger.
I leaned my forehead against the window’s glass, the city’s lights dissolving beneath me.
Now what? Should I meet him… or should I torch him down?
And what if it crushes me as well?
- Writer
