Chapter 465
Chapter 465:
For three seconds, nothing happened. Then the notification counter at the bottom of the screen ticked from 0 to 1. Then 100. Then it simply froze, displaying a “99+” that refused to update because the servers couldn’t keep up.
Twitter (X) exploded. Instagram crashed for a full minute. Skye Sterling Engaged trended to number one globally within fifteen minutes.
At the Kensington Estate, the mood was funereal.
Liam Kensington sat in his study. The room was dark, smelling of stale whiskey and unwashed bodies. He held his phone in a shaking hand.
He stared at the photo. He didn’t need to see the faces to know whose hand that was. He recognized the watch. He recognized the scar on the thumb.
Alistair Thorne.
The man he hated. The man who had taken everything from him.
But what hurt more was Skye’s hand. He remembered how her hand used to feel in his—cold, seeking warmth he never gave her. Now, in the photo, her hand looked relaxed. Safe.
“My equal,” Liam whispered, reading the caption.
The words cut deeper than any knife. She was saying he had never been her equal. And she was right.
A spasm of nausea hit him—violent and sudden. Liam doubled over in his wheelchair, clutching his stomach as his body convulsed. He retched dryly, his vision swimming with black spots. The withdrawal was reaching its peak. His nerves felt like live wires exposed to the air. Sweat dripped from his nose onto the screen of his phone, smearing the image of the hands.
His muscles twitched uncontrollably, his leg kicking out against the footrest. He ground his teeth together so hard he thought they might crack. The pain was blinding, a physical manifestation of the poison leaving his system.
“I… will… not… break,” he gasped, fighting the urge to call for his mother, to beg for the pills that would stop the shaking.
A sudden surge of rage overtook him, fueling him through the pain. He didn’t pour another drink. Instead, he hurled the crystal tumbler against the fireplace. It shattered, shards of glass spraying across the hearth.
“I am not done,” Liam hissed to the empty room, wiping the cold sweat from his upper lip with a trembling hand. His eyes, usually dull with self-pity, burned with a new, feverish intensity.
He looked at his reflection in the mirror—gaunt, confined to a wheelchair, trapped by his mother and Sienna.
𝘈ll 𝘯𝘰𝘷𝖾𝗅ѕ fr𝘦𝖾 𝗼𝗻 𝘣𝘦.co𝗺
“They think I am a pawn. They think I am broken. But pawns can still kill kings p>
Across town, in his newly funded office, Dominic Thorne saw the post.
He sneered at the screen. “Look at them,” he muttered to the empty room. “Preening like peacocks p>
He checked his bank balance. Ten billion dollars. The number was comforting. It was armor.
“Let them have their likes,” Dominic said, leaning back in his chair. “Tomorrow, I buy their graves. With this money, I can hostilely take over Oracle within a month. I’ll make Alistair watch while I dismantle his fiancée’s company piece by piece p>
He picked up his phone and called his PR team.
“Ramp up the bots,” Dominic ordered. “I want negative comments. I want rumors. Say the ring is fake. Say she’s pregnant. I don’t care. Just ruin the moment p>
Back at the penthouse, Skye watched the comments roll in.
“OMG is that Alistair Thorne p>
“The power couple we didn’t know we needed p>
“RIP Liam Kensington 101 p>
But then the bots arrived.
“She’s just a gold digger p>
“I heard she cheated on Liam first p>
“Oracle is a scam p>