Chapter 69: The cost

Colton’s POV

The first day back after the suspension and everywhere felt alien.

The office felt different.

Or maybe I was reading into it, the way the staff moved a little too efficiently when I passed, the way conversations seemed to end just slightly before I entered a room. Nobody was overtly hostile. Nobody was warm either.

All of them were unreadable.

I settled into my chair and exhaled slowly.

The meeting with Richard had gone well.

Better than expected. He’d been warm, relaxed, completely unrevealing and that was either genuinely good news or the most dangerous thing I’d encountered yet.

I leaned back and turned it over in my mind.

Either last night’s mess was fully contained and Richard suspected nothing, or Jocelyn was planning something significant and they’d both decided to play dumb while they studied my next move.

A knock at my office door pulled me from my thoughts.

“Come in.”

Stella entered, closing the door behind her with the particular confidence of someone who knew she was welcome.

She was my personal assistant.

Efficient, discreet, and beautiful in a way that made the discreetion necessary.

she was in her mid twenties, with sharp eyes and a professional composure that dissolved completely once the door was shut.

“Welcome back,” she said, setting a coffee on my desk with a smile that had nothing to do with hospitality.

“I missed this office,” I said.

“Just the office?” She raised an eyebrow.

“Don’t fish, Stella.” But I was already smiling.

She sat on the edge of my desk with her familiar, unbothered crossed her legs.

“You look tired,” she said.

“I am tired.”

“Kylie keeping you up?” The question was casual but her eyes were anything but.

I looked at her evenly. “Kylie is a means to an end, Nothing more.”

“You’ve said that before.”

“And I mean it every time I say it.” I reached up and pulled her toward me by the lapel of her blazer. “She’s a pawn. That’s all she’s ever been.”

Stella studied me for a moment, then seemed to accept this.

She set her notepad down slowly and crossed the distance between us until she was standing directly in front of my chair.

I leaned back, watching her, and she held my gaze with the particular confidence of a woman who knew exactly what she was doing.

“You really did miss me,” she said quietly.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” I replied.

But my hands found her waist anyway.

She lowered herself onto my lap, her fingers moving to my collar, straightening it with deliberate slowness.

“One month is a long time,” she murmured against my jaw.

“Too long,” I admitted.

She pulled back just enough to look at me, her eyes searching mine with something that went slightly beyond the arrangement we’d agreed on at the beginning of this thing. I chose not to examine that too closely.

Then she kissed me.

It started slow, until my tongue tasted what it had been missing for months now and whatever restraint I’d arrived at the office dissolved somewhere in the first few seconds.

I stood, taking her with me, and turned until she was against the desk, her hands gripping my shoulders, mine on either side of her on the polished surface.

She pulled me closer by the lapels of my jacket, and I let her, my mouth moving to her jaw, her neck, the curve of her collarbone.

“Colton,” she breathed.

“I know,” I said against her skin.

She laughed softly, that low, private laugh I hadn’t heard in a month—and the sound did something to whatever was left of my self-control.

I lifted her onto the desk. She wrapped her legs around me and pulled me in by the tie, and I went willingly, my hands in her hair, her fingers working at my shirt buttons with a familiarity that came from knowing exactly where we were going, somewhere we had been going all this while.

The city stretched wide and oblivious through the floor-to-ceiling windows behind her.

We were reckless in the sex, breathing heavily against each others shoulders yet neither of us stopped.

Until the footsteps came.

We separated with the usual pratice, Stella off the desk, blazer smoothed, hair fixed in three quick movements.

Me straightening my shirt, running a hand through my hair, dropping into my chair and reaching for the nearest document.

The footsteps slowed outside the door, paused, then continued.

We looked at each other across the desk, both breathing slightly harder than was professional, and said absolutely nothing.

Stella collected her notepad from where she’d abandoned it on the floor, pressed her lips together to contain whatever she was about to say, and moved toward the door with complete composure.

At the threshold she paused and glanced back.

“Your two o’clock file is on the left side of your desk,” she said, perfectly even.

“Thank you, Stella.”

She closed the door.

I sat back in my chair and exhaled at the ceiling.

Then my phone rang.

Dad.

“Dad?”

“We have to discuss something—.” His voice carried that particular flatness that told me this wasn’t a suggestion.

“I can’t take this call here,” I said immediately, lowering my voice. “If it’s about the family matter—”

“Then come home, Colton. Your mother and I will be there at four.”

He ended the call.

I arrived home to find the lights on and Kylie sitting comfortably on my sofa with a glass of wine, her shoes off, completely at ease.

I stopped in the doorway.

“How did you get in?” I asked.

“Spare key.” She looked up at me with that particular smile. “And before you ask, no, I don’t need permission to visit my fiancé.”

I scoffed before I could stop myself.

She sat up straighter. “What exactly does that mean?”

“Nothing.” I crossed to her and covered whatever expression I was making with a kiss before she could examine it further.

She pulled back slightly, searching my face.

“Kylie.” I kept my voice light. “My parents are coming at four.”

The shift in her expression was immediate. “So you want me gone.”

“I’m telling you the situation.” I replied blankly

She looked at me for a long moment, then reached for her shoes with a quiet that was more unsettling than if she’d argued.

“Fine,” she said simply.

She gathered her things without drama, which was somehow worse than drama, and I walked her to the door. I watched her cross to the elevator and pressed the button without looking back.

I closed the door and exhaled.

My parents arrived twelve minutes later.

I heard them before I saw them—my mother’s voice sharp and immediate in the foyer.

“Was that Kylie?” she demanded as I came to meet them.

“She was just leaving,” I said.

“She was just leaving.” Mum repeated it with the particular inflection of a woman storing evidence. “Colton, that girl walked out of your building looking like she lives there.”

“Megan.” My father’s voice, quiet and deliberate.

She turned.

“Sit down,” he said simply.

We sat.

Mum spent the next several minutes expressing everything she felt about Kylie with a thoroughness that covered character, lineage, loyalty, and long-term potential, none of which she rated highly.

“A girl who could betray her own sister,” she said, leaning forward, “will betray anyone. Anyone, Colton. Including you.”

“Mom.” I kept my voice measured. “Nothing substantial will ever come from my relationship with Kylie. She’s useful for now.”

“Useful!” She threw her hands up. “You’ve been useful together for years and what has it produced? A plan that collapses every single time! What if she gets pregnant for you?"

“She’ll get an abortion if necessary. I need her right now. She’s a tool, nothing more.”

“Spare me, Colton.” Mum sat back, jaw tight. “All your plans together have turned out the same way, Futile.”

My father’s deliberate cough cut through the room like a scalpel.

Silence fell immediately.

He looked at us both, then gestured toward the seats.

When Eric Asher decided to speak, you sat down and you listened. He had cultivated that authority over decades of being overlooked and underestimated, and he wielded it with the precision of a man who had waited a very long time to be heard.

“I was invisible my entire childhood,” he began, his voice low and unhurried. “Every achievement, every recognition, every word of praise—it went to Richard. He was always the good son, the brilliant one. The one Father actually saw.” He paused. “I could have failed every examination and no one would have noticed because the attention was never on me to begin with.”

The room was completely still.

“When Father died, he left everything to Richard. Not split. Not divided. Everything.” His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. “I watched my own mother celebrate that decision. I watched her comfort Richard at the funeral like he was the one who had lost something.”

I had heard versions of this before. But never this plainly. Never with this particular weight behind every word.

“I am not doing this out of greed,” Dad said, looking at me directly. “I am taking back what was always mine. What should have been ours.” He leaned forward slightly. “And I will not watch it pass from Richard’s hands to a bastard child carried by a woman who walked into our family through deception.”

“The child isn’t Colton’s,” Mum added flatly. “We all know it. The hospital will confirm what we already understand to be true.”

I opened my mouth.

“Don’t,” Dad said quietly.

I closed it.

“There’s no version of tomorrow where that paternity test serves us,” he continued. “Which means Jocelyn cannot be present for it. And if possible, neither can the child.”

I stared at him. “The security at the mansion is—”

“Already addressed,” Mum said.

I looked at her.

“The maid,” she said simply. “She’s been very cooperative.”

I felt the information land in my chest with a dull, heavy thud.

“By the end of today,” Dad said, “Jocelyn will either lose the baby or be in no condition to attend tomorrow. The results can be managed in the chaos that follows. Richard’s attention will fracture. His trust in the people around him will fracture.” He sat back. “And we will be positioned exactly where we need to be.”

The room was very quiet after he finished.

I sat with it.

I thought about Jocelyn—not the Jocelyn of the last several months, the one I’d been maneuvering against, the one who had become an obstacle and then a threat. The other one. The one who used to laugh at things I said before I even finished saying them. The one who made terrible tea and insisted it was fine. The one who had looked at me like I was someone worth knowing, once.

“Kill whatever you still feel for that girl,” Mum said, watching my face with the accuracy of a woman who had always been able to read me better than I wanted.

I said nothing.

“Sentiment is a luxury,” Dad said. “And we can’t afford it.”

They left an hour later, my mother straightening her coat at the door, my father already on his phone before they reached the elevator.

I stood in the center of my living room alone.

The apartment felt very large and very quiet.

I thought about what the other side of this looked like. If everything worked. If tomorrow fell in our favor and the weeks after that and the months after that. If I took the position I’d been promised since childhood and sat in the chair that had always been held up as the measure of my worth.

What then?

Who would I call?

Kylie, who I’d just mentally categorized as a pawn to my own mother. Stella, whose discretion was professional rather than personal. My parents, who loved the idea of victory more than they had ever loved me.

Not Jocelyn. Never again Jocelyn.

Not Richard, who I was systematically dismantling.

Money brings happiness, I told myself. Power. Influence. These things are company enough.

I believed it because I had to.

The alternative that I was burning down every real thing I had ever been given in exchange for a chair at a table that had never actually wanted me—was a thought I couldn’t afford to finish.

I reached for my phone and called Stella instead.

She answered on the second ring.

“Dinner?” I asked.

“Give me an hour,” she said.

I sat back down on the sofa where Kylie had been sitting an hour ago and stared at the ceiling.

Outside, the evening was settling into night.