Chapter 150
Lance
"Oh, I've been listening." He cut me off, and the coldness in his voice made my stomach drop. "I've been listening this whole fucking time. Actually—no, not just listening. I've been watching too." His laugh was sharp, ugly. "Those photos Felix showed me weeks ago? The ones of you and her at that gallery opening, at Balthazar, in your car outside her apartment?" He tilted his head, eyes glittering with something cruel. "Yeah. I saw every single one."
"And you know what I told myself? That you were just playing with her. That the great Lance Lawson would get bored like he always does, move on to the next shiny thing, and she'd come crawling back to me." The smile twisted into something uglier. "That she didn't mean anything."
His hands clenched into fists at his sides. "But today—hearing it from your own mouth—" The words came out strangled. "You can't live without her. You'd burn down everything, destroy me, just to have her. And you don't even care who's watching, do you?"
"Wesley, that's not—"
"Don't you dare lie to me again!" The words exploded out of him. "Just like Felix said—you're not just trying to steal my inheritance. You're fucking my ex-girlfriend, and you can't even pretend it's just about the sex anymore, can you?"
The accusation landed like a physical blow. "Wesley, I swear to God, your parents' money—every cent they left you—I haven't touched it. The trust is intact, I can show you the documents right now—"
"Then what about Serena?" He didn't give me time to breathe, didn't let me formulate a response that wouldn't damn me further. "Can you give her back to me? Can you?"
The question hung in the air between us, and I felt the ground shift beneath my feet. Because the honest answer—the answer I couldn't say, wouldn't say, even with a gun to my head—was no. Hell no. Never.
"Wesley." I forced my voice into something approaching calm, even as irritation began to seep through the guilt and panic. "I understand you're upset, but you need to face reality here. She's not your girlfriend anymore. You never valued her, never treated her with the respect she deserved, so you don't get to—"
"Oh, this is priceless!" Felix's laughter cut through my attempt at reason like nails on a chalkboard. "Lance, why don't you tell Wesley the truth? Tell him how you can't sleep at night without her. Tell him how all that pent-up sexual frustration you've been storing for years has finally found an outlet, and you've been fucking his ex-girlfriend like she's your personal stress relief!"
The crudeness of it, the deliberate vulgarity, snapped something inside me. I lunged for Felix again, but this time he didn't even try to dodge. He took my fist square in the jaw, his head snapping back with the force of the blow, and then he started laughing—actually laughing—as blood trickled from his split lip.
"Felix!" Wesley moved toward us, but Felix waved him off, still laughing like this was the best joke he'd heard in years.
"Wesley, my boy." Felix dabbed at his bleeding mouth with his sleeve, that manic grin never faltering. "You've been humiliated. I've been humiliated. We've both been pushed around and dismissed and treated like we don't matter." He straightened, fixing Wesley with an intense stare. "If you ever want to truly grow up, if you ever want to be taken seriously in this family, you know exactly what you need to do."
The implication hung heavy in the air, and I felt ice flood my veins all over again. "Wesley, don't listen to him. Whatever he's suggesting—"
But Wesley's eyes had changed. That burning hatred crystallized into something colder, sharper, more dangerous. Something I'd never seen in him before, not in all the years I'd known him, not even when I'd caught him with his hand in the company cookie jar or explained why his latest venture capital scheme was dead on arrival.
This was calculation. This was resolve.
"I'll handle it." Wesley's voice came out quiet, almost gentle, which made it infinitely more terrifying than if he'd shouted. He held my gaze for a long moment, and I searched desperately for any trace of the boy I'd raised, the kid who used to ask me to check under his bed for monsters, the teenager who'd cried in my office when his first girlfriend dumped him.
Gone. All of it, gone.
"Wesley—" I started, but he was already turning away, his footsteps echoing down the corridor with measured, deliberate precision.
"Wesley!" I called after him, louder this time, but he didn't even pause. Just kept walking, kept moving away from me with that new, terrible certainty in his stride, and I knew—God, I knew—that whatever came next would be worse than anything Felix could have orchestrated alone.