Chapter 140
After Winter finished speaking, the dim locker room went so quiet it felt as if the only sound left was her own breathing.
Even the voices that had been drifting in from the hallway seemed to vanish. It was as if the entire corridor had been cleared out in an instant.
Maybe only a few seconds passed. Maybe it was several minutes. Time stretched until it felt endless.
“Move. I’m going home p>
Winter reached for the doorknob, but Chris caught her hand and pinned it against the door. The thin calluses on his fingertips scraped across her soft skin.
She felt his broad shoulder press in toward her and instinctively lifted her hand to push him away.
But Chris turned and pinned her against the door instead. In the dim light, his dark eyes looked almost frightening.
“This ends here. This is not something you get to touch p>
Even in the dim light, her clear eyes shone with fierce resolve.
“So many people work every day to keep this world safe. Some of them even give their lives for it. If tearing this network apart costs me my own p>
Before she could finish, the hand gripping her wrist tightened sharply, his fingers digging in hard enough
to hurt.
Chris looked into her eyes, his voice suddenly dropping. “If I hadn’t stepped in tonight, you could’ve ended up dead. And then what? If you died, what would that actually change p>
Winter had to admit she had misjudged the situation tonight. The man she was up against was far more cunning and dangerous than she had expected.
“Maybe my death wouldn’t change anything right away,” she said, “but I still believe justice doesn’t die. Sooner or later, they’ll pay for what they’ve done p>
“Justice.” Chris let out a cold, unreadable laugh. Coming from Winter, that word felt almost ironic.
When Warren Scott, Winter’s father, tampered with the plane and caused the crash that killed Chris’s parents, he probably never imagined that twenty years later, his own daughter would be standing here talking about justice.
Then Chris let go of her wrist.
Winter’s heart was still pounding, but all at once, a sharp sense of emptiness washed over her. The next second, the doorknob turned. Chris let go of her completely and walked out of the locker room.
Hallway light spilled across the floor. Winter looked once at his cold, solitary back, then turned and
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walked away in the opposite direction.
The door closed behind her.
Chris stopped for a moment, his jaw tightening.
“Follow her p>
Gavin lowered his head. “Yes, sir p>
+25 Bonus
Late that night, Gavin returned to Blackwood Manor and went to Chris’s study, only to find it empty.
Instead, he found Chris standing in Winter’s study, a small clay fox in his hand.
If Gavin remembered correctly, Winter had insisted that Chris spend time with her on her eighteenth birthday, and the two of them had gone to a pottery studio together. Chris had made that little fox there.
Winter had left it behind.
Gavin couldn’t see Chris’s face. He only watched as Chris slowly set the fox back down on the desk, turned, and walked out, closing the study door behind him.
Back in his own study, Chris sat on the couch holding the sapphire brooch Winter used to keep on her nightstand.
She had left that behind too.
The two things she had once treasured most, the two things she had once hated to part with, had both been abandoned by her.
It was as if her voice still echoed in his ears, stubborn and angry, from that day in his room at Blackwood
Manor.
“I don’t want anything here anymore p>
Chris’s brows drew together, a shadow settling between them.
“You said the information on the anonymous donor is somewhere in the border region p>
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Florence
A passionate storyteller who brings emotions to life through her words. When she’s not writing, she finds peace nurturing her garden.