Chapter 2
890 Words
During the day I cut off the mop of hair that had spent years crushed under a hard hat, finally done playing the part of the bottom-rung cement worker.
I'd wanted to tell her the truth once, but she'd pointed at some real estate mogul on TV and curled her lip in disgust. "Construction guys reek of mud no matter how rich they get. Absolutely nauseating." So I swallowed the words back down. Quietly, I had my second-in-command Harrison Cole package the operation under the Cole Financial Group name, using a hundred-billion-dollar fortune to enshrine her as an untouchable ice queen. And she really believed I was some toad wallowing in the mud.
I changed into a Lorenzo Ricci tailored suit and rode straight up to the penthouse floor of the Summit Builders tower. Harrison, the public face and president of Seattle's largest financial group, greeted me at the door with practiced deference and escorted me to the seat at the head of the office.
His assistant briskly pulled up the wall screen. "Mr. Thorne, the funding and project you ordered pulled... you personally surveyed that site. You spent two years drafting those blueprints by hand..."
I stared at the sweeping aerial rendering on the screen. The foundation was already poured solid, cranes lined up ready to move. I was about to speak when a group chat window suddenly popped up on the display, one of the subcontractors' gossip channels. Pinned to the top was a video with a headline that hit like a hammer: Amarician Grad Student in Montevero: Private Party Footage Leaked With Three Local Men！
The video auto-played, filthy moans spilling out of the speakers. I stared, thunderstruck. In that single second I recognized the face behind the thin blur on the thumbnail. It was Serena.
Then hundreds of comments started scrolling by, and the fragments cut into my chest like needles.
A: [Wait, isn't that the PhD from Hudson University? Didn't think she had it in her, lol. Her husband is getting played hard.]
B: [Heard her husband's just some construction grunt. What do you expect from dirtbag types? He earned it.]
C: [Wasn't Mr. Cole funding this Serena chick? Someone put in a word, send her over to entertain us, haka.]
The office went dead silent. Before anyone else could react, Harrison's face turned ashen and he thundered at the assistant, "You imbecile! Who authorized putting garbage like that in front of Mr. Thorne? Get word out. Every single person in that chat goes on the group's permanent blacklist, no project, ever. By tomorrow morning, none of them will have a leg to stand on in this industry."
The assistant scrambled to close the lewd feed and bowed frantically in apology.
I stood frozen for a long moment, the blood roaring in my ears. During the years Serena studied abroad, terrified she'd run short and get pushed around by strangers, I'd worked myself into the ground on the sites. Every month I kept eight dollars for ramen and canned beans and wired every last cent of my wages, plus the "nutrition money" I got from selling my blood, straight into her account. In sub-zero winters that felt like needles in the bones, I couldn't bring myself to buy down jackets and picked up the torn clothes my coworkers tossed.
The day she landed back home, I put on my cleanest shirt and rushed to the airport, ready to sweep her into my arms, but she flinched away like I was a plague. "Don't touch me in public. You stink. People are laughing at us." It hurt then, but at least I told myself she'd kept herself clean and hadn't gone wild overseas the way people warn. Only now did I realize the whole world had been laughing at me the entire time.
I picked up the approval form and tore it to shreds. "Kill the project. Recover every dollar. I want them coughing it all back up with interest."
Harrison didn't dare breathe. "Understood," he said, head lowered.
I pressed a thumb against a throbbing temple. Two seconds of silence later, my phone erupted, the family group chat blowing up. Then my mother called, her voice cracking into sobs. "Asher, what have you done? You've dragged the Thorne family's name through the dirt!"
I opened my phone. Two minutes earlier, Serena had dropped an 80-page slide deck into the family chat. The title screamed in blood-red text, Ironclad Proof That Low-Class Abuser Asher Thorne Cheated Repeatedly in Marriage and Is a Psychological Deviant.
Inside were site-survey photos from my early mornings and late nights over the past three years, doctored and twisted to look like I'd been sneaking into cheap motels for affairs. Over on trending on X, her tearful accusation video had already broken three million views, and the comments were a stampede of people saying a dirtbag like me should've died on a job site years ago.
My eyes turned cold as I forwarded everything to Harrison. "Get evidence on all of it. And in three days, we're holding the global launch event for the project. I want the entire leadership of Hudson University, every faculty member and student, and all our so-called top-tier investors in that room."
I was going to ruin her, publicly, in front of every last one of them.
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