Chapter 148
Chapter 148:
She looked out the window at the rising sun. She had won this round. She had humiliated her enemies and claimed her power. But she knew the war was not over. A rat is most dangerous when it’s cornered, and Seraphina Miller was definitely cornered.
Skye touched the silver hawk brooch on her lapel.
“Let them come,” she whispered.
The fluorescent lights of the Apex Logistics break room buzzed with the irritating frequency of a dying insect. Seraphina Miller stared at the mop bucket. The water was a murky, opaque grey, swirling with the grime of a hundred warehouse boots. The smell was a chemical assault—industrial bleach masking the underlying stench of stale urine and wet cardboard.
She dipped the mop into the water. Her hands, once manicured to perfection with soft pink gel polish, were now red and chapped. The harsh detergent had eaten away at her skin in less than forty-eight hours. A hangnail on her thumb throbbed in time with her heartbeat.
“Missed a spot, princess,” a voice grunted from the doorway.
It was Hank, the floor manager. He had a stain on his shirt that looked like mustard and eyes that held zero sympathy.
Seraphina gripped the wooden handle of the mop until her knuckles turned white. She wanted to scream. She wanted to throw the bucket at his head. She wanted to tell him that she was Seraphina Miller, the woman who had almost been Mrs. Kensington, the woman who had worn silk and slept on Egyptian cotton.
But she didn’t.
Because she was hungry.
The hunger was a physical weight in her stomach, a gnawing emptiness she couldn’t charm away. Her bank accounts were frozen zeros. Her credit cards were plastic scraps. She was living in a motel room that smelled of mildew, and this minimum-wage check was the only thing standing between her and the street.
“I’m getting it,” she whispered, her voice cracking.
She pushed the mop across the linoleum. The grey water sloshed over the rim, soaking into the hem of her oversized uniform pants. The fabric clung to her ankles, cold and wet.
о𝗿𝗂𝗀𝘪𝗻а𝗹 c𝗼n𝘵𝖾nt 𝘧𝘳o𝗺 b𝗲𝗅ո𝗼𝗏𝖾𝗅ѕ.𝗰om
Hank laughed, a wet, hacking sound, and walked away.
Seraphina squeezed her eyes shut. A single, hot tear escaped, tracking through the cheap foundation she had tried to apply that morning to maintain some semblance of dignity.
She thought of Liam. He would save her. He had to. He was just angry. Men got angry, but they always came back. She just needed to talk to him, to explain that Skye had manipulated everything.
She dragged the mop bucket toward the janitorial closet. It felt like dragging a corpse.
High above the city, in the climate-controlled silence of the Oracle Tower, Skye Sterling watched the feed. The monitor on her desk was high-definition. She could see the trembling of Seraphina’s shoulders. She could see the defeat in the slump of her spine.
Skye took a sip of her black coffee. It was bitter, hot, and grounding.
“She looks miserable,” Harper Quinn said, standing by the window, watching the screen with a mixture of awe and unease. “Are you sure this is legal? Watching her p>