Chapter 22 This Mess You've Caused
The silence between us grows tense.
Caius stands at the window with his back to me, staring out at the city below. His shoulders are rigid. His hands are clasped behind him.
"What... what are we going to do?" I ask quietly. Like even I don't fully believe I deserve an answer.
He doesn't even turn around to respond. "I'm going to fix it."
"How?"
"That's not your concern."
I bite down on the inside of my cheek. Hard enough to sting. Hard enough that I can almost taste blood.
"It is my concern," I say. "I caused this. I'm the one who opened my mouth. I'm the one who sat across from her and said things I should never have said. If there's anything I can do to help fix it, I want to. I need to."
He turns then slowly. And the look on his face stops me cold. It isn't anger. The fact that I can't decipher it is the daunting part.
"Leave it to me," he says simply.
"But—"
"Lia." He says firmly. "I said leave it to me."
I know I should listen. I know I should nod and step back and let him do what he always does which is to handle things cleanly and privately and without needing me to be part of the solution. That's who Caius Michael is. He doesn't ask for help. He doesn't share the weight of anything.
But I can't just stand here and say nothing.
"She gave me a deadline," I say. "Twenty-four hours. That was yesterday morning." I check my phone with hands that won't stop shaking. "Which means we have six hours and forty minutes left."
His jaw tightens immediately, his eyes sharpening.
"You should have led with that," he says. "You should have led with that, Lia."
"I tried to tell you last night."
A muscle ticks in his jaw. We both know that's true. We both know he slammed a door in my face and refused to listen.
He presses his palm flat against his forehead and squeezes his eyes shut for just a moment. One brief second of visible frustration. Then he exhales and when he opens his eyes again, the mask is back.
"I need to be alone right now, Lia," he says flatly. "I need to think of how to get out of this mess you've caused."
This mess you've caused.
The words sting. They find the part of me that already believed them and they make themselves at home.
I don't argue. What would be the point? He's right, and I know he's right, and standing here trading words isn't going to bring back a single one of the six hours and thirty-nine minutes we have left.
So I turn around. And I walk out.
~
My room feels different when I enter and close the door behind me.
I don't know if that's real or just in my head. Probably my head. Everything feels smaller right now. Like the walls itself are slowly deciding to move inward whether I want them to or not.
I lie down flat on the bed. I don't have the energy for anything except staring at the ceiling and trying to breathe through the weight sitting on my chest.
So that's what I do.
I stare at the ceiling.
And slowly, the full weight of what I've done begins to settle over me.
I let a stranger walk into this home and handed her everything. Our secret. Our arrangement. Our entire carefully built lie. She sat across from me with a smile on her face and a recording app running on her phone, and I gave her every single piece of ammunition she needed in under twenty-five minutes.
Twenty-four minutes and thirty-two seconds, to be exact.
I remember the timer on her screen. I remember watching the numbers climb. I remember feeling the floor tilt beneath me.
And I still said nothing. I did nothing. Just sat there while the damage piled up.
But underneath the guilt about the recording, underneath the sick dread of the deadline ticking closer, there's something else. Something I've been trying not to look at directly since I walked out of that study.
My mother.
Right now, in this moment, she's in a hospital bed across the city with experimental treatment running through her veins. Treatment that costs more money than I will earn in twenty years. Treatment that exists because Caius Michael transferred nearly a million dollars without hesitation. Without conditions. Without making me feel small about needing it.
He kept his end of this arrangement.
And I have destroyed mine.
If my mistake costs Leo, if Vanessa sends that recording to Catherine and the court pulls custody, what happens to our contract? Caius would have every right to void it. He could pull the funding today if he wanted to. With just one phone call.
And then my mother's treatment stops.
And then she dies.
And the money already spent, almost a million dollars, becomes a debt. A real one, with real consequences. The kind I could never repay. Not in five years. Not in ten. Not in a lifetime of executive assistant salaries.
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes.
I try to stop spiraling and thinking, but I cant.
Because aside all of that, aside the contract and the money and the deadline is something even more frightening.
Leo.
I think about his small face and how much h he trusts me. How much he needs me in his life. How he had said those words.
'Please don't leave me like Mama and Papa did.'
I made him a pinky promise.
And now, because of me, he might lose everything again. He might lose the home he's just started to feel safe in. The people he's just started to trust.
All of it, undone.
Because I couldn't keep my mouth shut.
The tears start rolling down my eyes and I don't try to stop them.
I don't have anything left to stop them with.
I lie there and I cry and I think about my mother's face and Leo's pinky and Caius standing at the window like a man who has already decided he is done being disappointed by me.
After a while, the tears run out. Not because anything is better now but because the body has limits, and mine has apparently reached them.
My eyes soon grow heavy.
And before I realize what's happening…
Sleep takes me.
Whil
e somewhere in the background of my mind, a terrible thought lingers.
In a few hours…
Just a few hours...
Vanessa's deadline will be over.