Chapter 124 The Gutter
Nate’s POV
The interior of the S-Class was silent, but the air felt thin, stripped of the warmth that had sustained me only an hour ago. Leaving Mila’s dorm had felt like stepping out of a sanctuary and into a meat grinder. I could still feel the phantom pressure of her fingers against my skin and the echo of her voice—the way she had whispered she loved me, finally letting the last of her walls crumble.
I had spent my entire life building fortresses, but it took a girl in a faded gray T-shirt to show me what it actually meant to be home. Now, the cold of a New York January was seeping back into my bones, amplified by the looming shadow of the skyscraper ahead. I knew exactly why I had been summoned. Alexandra Salvatore didn’t call emergency meetings at dawn to discuss quarterly earnings. She called them to perform surgery on anything she deemed a malignancy.
And in her eyes, my love for Mila Stone was the ultimate cancer.
The elevator ride to the penthouse office was a countdown. When the doors slid open, the atmosphere changed. The Salvatore Enterprises headquarters was a temple of glass, steel, and ruthless efficiency. It was a world I had been bred to rule, yet as I strode toward my mother’s double doors, it felt like a cage.
Alexandra was standing by the floor-to-ceiling windows, her back to me. She was perfectly coiffed, her suit sharp enough to bleed, silhouetted against a skyline she considered her personal chessboard. She didn't turn around when I entered.
"You’re late, Nathaniel," she said. Her voice was calm, a low-frequency hum that carried more threat than a scream ever could. "But I suppose 'slumming' takes a significant amount of one's time."
"Get to the point, Alexandra," I snapped, stopping at the edge of her massive mahogany desk. "I’m not in the mood for the maternal theatrics. You called an emergency meeting. Where is the board?"
She turned then, a thin, porcelain smile playing on her lips—the kind of smile a predator wears right before the killing blow. "There is no board meeting. There is only a mother attempting to salvage what remains of her son’s dignity before he drags the Salvatore legacy into the gutter."
"The gutter," I repeated, my voice dropping an octave, vibrating with a dangerous edge. "Is that what you call it? Because from where I’m standing, the only thing dirty in this room is your obsession with my private life."
"Private?" She tilted her head, walking toward me with a slow, predatory grace. "Nathaniel, you are a Salvatore. You have no private life. You have a brand. You have a lineage. And you are currently wasting both on a girl who comes from criminal stock. The daughter of a common thief and a social climber who fled the city like rats the moment the lights turned on."
My hands balled into fists at my sides, the leather of my gloves creaking. "Mila is not her parents. She has more integrity in her smallest finger than you’ve had in your entire life. If you brought me here to berate her character, we’re done."
"Integrity," she mused, reaching for a sleek, black folder resting on the desk. "A charming word. But it holds very little weight when faced with the tawdry reality of your choices."
She didn't throw the folder. She slid it. The sound of the cardstock dragging across the polished wood was loud in the sterile silence of the office.
"Look at them," she commanded softly. "Look at the 'integrity' of your evening."
I opened the folder, expecting surveillance logs or perhaps a background check. Instead, the air was punched out of my lungs.
They were high-resolution, crystal clear, and devastatingly explicit. There were photos taken through the dorm window—the angles sharp, the intrusion absolute. They were all from the previous night. Every single one of them captured the heat and the desperation of our bodies entangled on that narrow bed. The camera had caught the arch of Mila’s back, the way my hands had gripped her hips, the raw, unscripted abandonment of us making love in the amber light of her desk lamp.
The invasion was physical. I felt a surge of white-hot nausea followed by a rage so profound it blinded me. Someone had been there. Someone had watched the most sacred, vulnerable moment of my life through a lens, turning our intimacy into a collection of sordid data points for my mother’s leverage.
"You crossed a line," I whispered, my voice shaking with the effort not to vault over the desk. "You sent someone to watch us? To photograph her like this?"
"I did what was necessary to see the extent of your delusion," Alexandra corrected, her voice unmoved. "Do you have any idea what would happen if these fell into the wrong hands? If the tabloids got hold of these, the Salvatore name would be dragged through the mud for a decade. I will not have our legacy associated with a scandal of this... caliber. It’s repulsive."
She looked at the folder with genuine disgust, her eyes flicking over the images as if they were evidence of a crime. "I am having the originals and all digital traces destroyed, Nathaniel. Not for your sake, but for the family’s. I will not have you linked to a girl of her standing in such a graphic, public way. It is beneath us. It is beneath you."
The bile rose in my throat as I stared at the grain of the photos. While she claimed she would destroy them to protect the name, the mere fact that they existed meant our sanctuary was compromised. My mind raced through the implications—the security of the dorm, the perimeter I had thought was airtight, and the sheer vulnerability Mila was in without even knowing it. If my mother’s hired vultures could get these shots, who else was lurking in the shadows? The thought of some nameless photographer watching Mila, capturing her in her most private moments of surrender, made me want to burn the building to the ground.
I looked at my mother, seeing the cold, calculating woman who had replaced whatever ghost of a parent I once remembered. She wasn't doing this to help me; she was pruning a hedge, cutting away the "weeds" she thought were choking the Salvatore garden. But she didn't realize that Mila wasn't a weed. She was the only thing keeping me rooted in a world that had become entirely too hollow.
"You stay away from her," I growled, my voice low and lethal, vibrating with a promise of violence that even she couldn't ignore. "If I find out you’ve so much as breathed in her direction again, I will dismantle every piece of this company before your eyes."
"I don't need to go near her," Alexandra said, picking up a silver lighter from her desk with terrifyingly steady hands. "The gutter eventually claims its own. I’m simply making sure you don't fall in with her when the inevitable happens."