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Chapter 626
Chapter 626:
Her Apple Watch hummed against her wrist. One pulse, then two. She raised her arm and pretended to check the time. The screen glowed with a message from Archer. Three words.
“The hound departs p>
June lowered her arm. She drained the champagne in a single swallow — cold, sharp, irrelevant — and set the empty glass on a passing tray.
She turned to Easton. Her eyes were bright with the feverish, crystalline clarity of ice just before it cracks.
“The show,” she said, “is beginning p>
Crawford Love stood at the bar, a glass of Macallan 25 in his hand, and watched June Erickson walk into the room on Easton Hahn’s arm.
He had known she would be here. He had received the invitation list three days ago and noted her name with the calm acceptance of a man who had learned to expect pain. But knowing and seeing were different creatures entirely.
The dress was Tom Ford. He recognized the cut, the fabric, the way it held to her body like a second skin. Gray. The same shade as Hahn’s suit. They had coordinated. They had planned this.
His fingers tightened around the crystal. The glass was heavy, cut in a pattern that scattered light into rainbows. It made a sound — a sharp, clean crack — as his grip exceeded its tolerance. The woman beside him, a venture capitalist’s wife whose name he had already forgotten, gasped.
Crawford looked at his hand. A hairline fracture ran from the rim to the base, a spiderweb of destruction that mirrored something in his chest. He set the glass on the bar without apology and walked toward June.
𝖱o𝗆𝖺𝗻𝗰е 𝘢n𝘥 𝗉𝘢ѕ𝘀i𝘰𝗇 𝘰ո
Above him, on the second floor, Cole Compton pressed his forehead against the one-way glass of the VIP lounge and tried to breathe.
He had been ordered to stay here. His grandmother’s command, delivered through Mrs. Lynch with the finality of a death sentence: maintain the dignity of the Compton name, do not descend, do not make a scene. He had agreed. He had promised. He had even believed himself capable of keeping that promise.
Then he saw June.
She was laughing at something Hahn had whispered — some private intimacy that Cole could not hear but could imagine with perfect, devastating clarity. Her head tilted toward the lawyer’s shoulder, her body angled easily into his presence, her hand resting on his arm with a familiarity that spoke of something Cole had never been given.
His fist struck the glass. The impact was absorbed by the laminate, but the pain was real. He felt the skin split across his knuckles, felt the warmth of blood rising, and welcomed it.
She had never looked at him that way. Not once. Not in three years of marriage, not in the months of pursuit that followed, not even in the rare moments when she had tolerated his presence. She looked at Hahn as if he were the only person in the room.