Chapter 55 Regrets
Raphael's POV
I watched her from the CCTV camera in my office, my eyes fixed on the small screen that showed her desk on the fourth floor. The image was grainy, black and white, but I could see everything I needed to see. Every small movement. Every shift in her posture. Every moment of her pain.
The confusion came first. I saw it in the way she tilted her head at her computer screen, reading the email that had just arrived in her inbox.
Her hand moved slowly to her mouse, clicking, scrolling, reading it again as if she couldn't quite believe what she was seeing. Then came the pain. It washed over her face like a wave, visible even through the poor quality of the security footage.
Her lips parted slightly, and I knew she was trying to catch her breath, trying to hold herself together in the middle of the open office where dozens of her colleagues could see her.
The disappointment followed quickly after. I watched as she closed her eyes for a long moment, and I could almost hear the sound of her heart breaking from three floors away. Then came the realization.
The final, crushing understanding that this was it. This was really happening. Her marriage, her job, her life as she knew it, all of it was ending.
Her back curved forward as if someone had placed a heavy weight on her shoulders. She slumped in her chair, looking smaller somehow, diminished by the words she had just read from HR. The termination notice. The end of her employment at Laurent Industries. The final severing of any official tie between us.
I felt it too. God, I felt it too. It was painful watching her suffer, knowing that I was the cause of it all. Knowing that every moment of her anguish was because of me, because of the choices I had made, because of the lies I had told and the truths I had hidden.
The marriage was supposed to be temporary. That was the plan from the beginning. A business arrangement that would last a year, maybe two at most. Just long enough to satisfy the terms of the board members to secure my position in the company, to check off the boxes that needed to be checked.
Then we would quietly divorce, go our separate ways, and move on with our lives as if it had never happened.
But I kept it going longer than I should have. Month after month, year after year, I found reasons to delay. Found excuses to postpone the inevitable. Because Vivienne was too good to just leave and ignore like that. She was kind and genuine and honest in a world that had very little of any of those things.
She brought light into rooms just by entering them. She made me laugh when I thought I had forgotten how. She made me want to be a better man than I was.
How could I just let that go?
But Margot refused to let us have peace. My sister had made that abundantly clear from the very beginning. She had opposed the marriage from the moment I announced it, and she had spent every day since trying to destroy it. Trying to destroy Vivienne.
If only Vivienne knew the truth. If only she knew that the attack on me three years ago, the one that left me in the hospital for two weeks with broken ribs and a concussion, was never meant for me at all. It was meant for her.
The men who had beaten me in that parking garage had been hired to hurt her, to scare her, to make her run away and never come back. But they had gotten confused in the dark. They had attacked me instead, thinking I was alone, not realizing that Vivienne was the real target.
If only she knew that Margot and Gaston had orchestrated the whole thing just to pause the wedding. Just to buy themselves time. The wedding had been scheduled for the following week, and they were desperate to stop it from happening.
So they hired thugs to do their dirty work, to create chaos and fear and uncertainty.
It worked. The wedding was postponed. I was too injured to stand, let alone get married. And by the time I had recovered enough, months had passed, and the momentum was gone. We ended up having a small, quiet ceremony. Margot had won that round.
I just couldn't tell Vivienne all of this. How could I? How do you tell the person you care about that her own family has been trying to hurt her? That the people who smile at her during family dinners and ask her how she's doing are the same people who would see her broken and bleeding if it served their purposes?
I don't want her to have this illusion that Margot is happy for her. She doesn't need to live in a fantasy world where she thinks Margot has finally let her be. Margot is a ruthless, calculating woman who cares only about money and power and her own position in the family hierarchy.
How do I tell her that Gaston and Margot are trying to prevent the marriage from happening to block their takeover of the Laurent trust? The trust that her grandfather set up, the one that controls the majority shares of Laurent Industries, the one that can only be accessed by a married heir. That's all this has ever been about for them. Not family. Not love. Not loyalty. Just money and control.
The enemies that were after her were too much. I thought I could save her. I really did. I thought that by marrying her, by keeping her close, by surrounding her with security and making her part of the Moreau family, I could protect her from all of it. From Margot's schemes. From Gaston's ambitions. From the business rivals who saw her as a weakness they could exploit.
But it only worsened everything. It didn't stop. Instead of protecting her, I had painted an even bigger target on her back.
Now she wasn't just someone I cared about, she was my wife, a Moreau, someone with access to family secrets and company information. Someone who could be used against me in a dozen different ways.
The threats continued to come.
Anonymous letters. Strange phone calls in the middle of the night. Cars that followed her home from work. I hired more security, changed her routes, and tried to keep her safe. But I couldn't tell her why. Couldn't explain what was really happening. Couldn't give her the truth she deserved.
I just couldn't tell her any of it. I couldn't. Because telling her would break her, or so I thought. She would look at me with those trusting eyes and ask me why I hadn't told her sooner. Why did I let her walk into danger without warning her? Why I had married her knowing what my family was capable of.
And I would have no good answer. Because the truth was that I was a coward. I was caught in between the hatred, the hatred my family had for her, the hatred I was beginning to feel for them, and the complicated tangle of feelings I had for Vivienne herself.
So I watched her suffer on that grainy camera feed, and I did nothing. I let HR send the termination notice. I let her think I had abandoned her. I let her believe the lie because the truth was so much worse