Chapter 311
Chapter 311:
Dominic slumped, defeated.
Medics arrived and loaded Seraphina onto a stretcher. As they lifted her, a packet fell out from under her dress. It was a plastic bladder, punctured, leaking red dye.
“This isn’t blood,” a medic muttered, sniffing the liquid. “It smells like corn syrup and food coloring. It’s sticky p>
The crowd murmured in disgust.
“A fake pregnancy. A fake fall. A fake life,” Skye said, looking at the Kensingtons.
Beatrice collapsed into a chair, covering her face with her hands. The Kensington name was ruined—truly, irrevocably ruined.
Liam stood alone in the center of the room. He looked at Skye. He saw the woman he had thrown away, standing tall, victorious, and untouchable.
He realized then that he hadn’t just lost a wife. He had lost the only real thing in his life.
Skye didn’t look back at him.
She walked to the stairs where Alistair was descending. She took his arm.
“Let’s go home,” she said.
“Gladly,” Alistair said, kissing her forehead.
They walked out of the gala, leaving the Kensingtons in the wreckage of their own lies.
The heavy oak doors of the estate had closed with a finality that echoed in Liam’s mind long after the sound faded.
The next morning, the heavy oak doors of the Kensington Global executive suite were pushed open again—but this time, it wasn’t a deferential subordinate. It was a force of nature.
The manila folder hit the mahogany desk with a sound that was less a thud and more a guillotine blade dropping. Dense. Final. Heavy with the weight of the previous night’s catastrophe—the livestreamed confession, the police sirens, the utter annihilation of the Kensington reputation at the Charity Gala.
Liam Kensington didn’t look up immediately. He couldn’t.
He sat behind his sprawling desk, the city skyline framed perfectly in the floor-to-ceiling windows behind him, though the view now seemed to mock him. The city was buzzing, he knew—buzzing with footage of his fiancée, Seraphina Miller, being handcuffed in her stolen designer gown. Buzzing with the revelation that she was a fraud, and that he—the great Liam Kensington—had been her fool.
He was signing documents: damage-control directives, PR statements, liquidity requests. His Montblanc pen scratched against paper in a rhythmic, frantic tempo.
𝖥𝗂𝘯d уо𝗎𝘳 𝘧a𝘃or𝗶𝘵е 𝘨𝘦n𝘳e oո b𝗲𝗹𝗇𝗼v𝗲𝗅ѕ.𝖼𝗈𝘮
Scritch. Scratch. Pause. Scritch. Scratch.
He was wearing the same navy suit he had worn to the gala, now rumpled, his tie loosened, his jaw set in a familiar, arrogant angle that was beginning to crack under the strain of reality.
“I’m busy, Skye,” he said, voice raspy from hours of screaming at lawyers. He didn’t stop writing.
Skye Sterling stood on the other side of the desk. She wasn’t trembling. She wasn’t the girl who used to beg for his attention. She was dressed in a sharp, slate-gray business suit, her hair pulled back into a severe bun. She looked like a CEO arriving to inspect a failing subsidiary.
“You can be busy and bankrupt at the same time,” she said. Her voice was steady, cooled by the antiseptic air of the ICU where she had spent the last six hours sitting by Gabriel Ross’s bedside. “Read the folder, Liam p>
He turned a page.
Scritch. Scratch.
“I told you,” he murmured, attempting to summon his old dismissiveness. “We are not doing this today. I have a board meeting in twenty minutes to explain why the stock has dropped thirty percent since midnight p>