Chapter 82 Wi

Chapter 82 Wi

\# Chapter 1: The Wife He Was Ashamed Of

My husband walked into the gala with another woman on his arm, and I followed behind them carrying his coat.

"This is Vivienne. Vivienne Sinclair," Dorian announced to the senator's wife.

He did not introduce me. He did not even glance my way.

I stood there holding his coat like hired help, and humiliation crawled up my neck and burned across my cheeks. Five years. I had been married to this man for five years, and he could not bring himself to say my name in front of these people.

Vivienne turned and looked me over from head to toe, slow and deliberate, taking in my dress and my arms and my body.

"Oh, you brought the assistant," she remarked.

A few people laughed. Not loudly. Just enough for me to hear every single one of them.

And then Dorian laughed too.

That laugh went through me like a knife. Not her cruelty. His laugh. My husband stood in front of forty people and laughed at his own wife because defending me would have cost him something.

"Sera helps around the house," he explained.

My chest caved in. Five years of marriage, and that was all I was worth to him. A woman who helps around the house.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to throw his coat on the floor and ask him in front of every one of them how he could do this to me. Instead I smiled and said nothing, because that was what I had done for five years, and I had gotten very good at it.

"Darling." Genevieve appeared at my elbow with her cane. My mother-in-law never raised her voice. She never had to. "Do try to stand somewhere the light is kinder."

"I'm fine, Genevieve."

"It's a charity function, Seraphina." She patted my arm once and pulled her hand back fast, the way you touch something you would rather not. "The charity is not you."

The words landed like a punch to the stomach. I had spent five years trying to make these people love me, and they still looked at me like something the cleaners had missed.

Across the room, a man was watching me.

He stood by the window with a glass he was not drinking from, and he was not laughing. He was simply looking at me, calm and steady, as though I were the only person in that entire ballroom worth his attention.

Our eyes met. He did not look away.

I did.

I found a corner and stood in it, and I thought about the thing none of these people knew.

Nine days ago, Ashcroft Group had come within hours of collapsing. A document had leaked. By morning the company would have been dead. Dorian never knew how close it came. The board never knew how close it came.

I knew. I was the one sitting in the study at three in the morning, moving money through accounts that carried no name of mine, saving his company for the eleventh time.

On Monday he stood in front of his people and took the credit.

He never asked me how it happened. In five years he never once asked what I did all day at that desk.

I used to tell myself that love meant staying quiet. That a good wife holds the ladder while her husband climbs, and one day he would look down and finally see her. I held that ladder for five years. He never looked down. Not once.

Vivienne's laughter rang out behind me, and when I turned, Dorian's hand was resting on the small of her back.

He was not even hiding it. Hiding it would have meant he thought I might care.

Something inside me went very quiet then, and in that terrible silence I finally understood the truth.

He was never going to love me. And I was never going to stop waiting for him to.

Not unless I walked away.

I left before he did. I drove home, went straight to the linen closet, and pulled out the black phone Dorian did not know existed.

Noor answered on the first ring.

"Sera?"

"Bring the papers tonight," I told her.

Silence stretched down the line. Then I heard her start to cry, and I realized my own face was already wet.

"Are you sure about this?" she whispered.

"I have never been more sure of anything."

I sat on the edge of our bed in the dark and waited for my husband to come home. He walked in at midnight still glowing from whatever the night had given him, and he stopped dead when he saw the file lying on the bed.

"What is that?"

"Open it," I answered.

He picked it up and read the first page, and I watched every trace of colour drain out of his face.

"Divorce papers." He said the words slowly, as though they belonged to a language he had never learned. "Sera, this is insane. You're upset. You always get emotional after these things."

"I am not upset."

"Then what is this supposed to be?"

"This is me leaving you."

He laughed. My husband actually laughed at me, and I felt the last living thing in my chest wither and die.

"And where exactly do you think you are going to go?" He shook his head, still smiling at me like I was a child throwing a tantrum. "You have nothing, Sera. No job. No money. No family. Every single thing you own, I gave you."

He was so certain. That was what I would remember later, when the whole world found out. How certain he was.

"Sign it, Dorian."

"You'll be back within a week." He uncapped his pen and signed his name without reading one line of it, because he did not believe a word coming out of my mouth. "You'll come crawling back, and we will never speak of this again."

I took the papers out of his hand.

"No," I replied. "I won't."

I walked out of that house with nothing, exactly the way he said I would, and I did not tell him the truth.

I did not tell him that the company he thought he built was still standing because of me.

I did not tell him that Vesper, the fashion house this entire city was obsessed with, belonged to me.

And I did not tell him that the name I gave up the day I married him, my mother's name, was Castellane.