Chapter 134
Chapter 134:
In the back seat, Cole sat hunched forward, his bloody right hand open in his lap. He stared at the diamond orchid resting in his palm. He used his thumb to carefully, almost desperately, wipe a drop of his own blood from one of the pink sapphires.
He had to give it back. He had to get onto his knees and explain that he hadn’t known. He had to make her understand it was a mistake — that even he was not capable of something this deliberate, this monstrous.
The Maybach braked hard outside her building.
Cole kicked the door open and ran through the lobby without a word to the concierge, straight into the elevator, and down the hallway to her door.
His hands shook as he reached for the smart lock and typed his six-digit code.
BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. ERROR.
The red light blinked.
Cole stared at it. He typed the numbers again, faster.
ERROR.
She had changed the code. She had physically, deliberately cut his access to the one place she inhabited.
“June!” His voice cracked and broke against the steel door. He drove his fist into it. “June, open the door. Please.” He pressed his forehead against the cold metal. “I have the brooch. I didn’t know — I swear to God I didn’t know it was your mother’s. Please. Let me give it back to you p>
𝘚𝗁a𝗋𝖾 y𝗼ur 𝘧𝘢𝘷𝘰r𝗶𝘵𝖾𝘴 𝖿𝗋o𝗺
Silence.
The apartment was as quiet as a tomb.
Cole pounded until the side of his fist was bruised and bleeding. Then, without any deliberate decision, his legs simply gave out beneath him. He slid slowly down the face of the door, the fabric of his tuxedo dragging against the wall, until he was sitting on the hallway floor with his knees pulled to his chest.
He pressed the bloody brooch against his sternum and buried his face in his knees.
The motion-sensor lights in the hallway timed out and clicked off one by one.
The darkness was total.
Cole sat on the floor alone, and in that darkness, the full weight of what he had done — what he had spent four years doing — settled over him without mercy. He had burned the bridge to the only woman who had ever truly loved him. He was sitting in the ashes now, and there was no way back across them.
The morning mist over Manhattan was thick and gray, swallowing the tops of the skyscrapers whole.
Inside the top-floor office of Compton Tower, the air was cold and still. Cole sat behind his mahogany desk, having not slept a single second. He had spent the entire night on the hallway floor outside June’s apartment, staring at a door that would never open for him again.
His eyes were completely bloodshot. His tuxedo was wrinkled beyond saving.
Resting at the center of his desk was the Cartier orchid brooch. The crushed diamonds caught the cold morning light with indifferent precision. The pink sapphires still carried a faint, dried smear of his blood where the pin had pierced his palm.
Every time his eyes moved to it, his stomach contracted violently. The nausea of his own cruelty was consuming him from the inside.
A sharp knock broke the silence.