Chapter 137

Chapter 137
Alina's POV

The moment Adams finished speaking, every head in the room turned toward me. Curiosity, appraisal, shock — all of it landing at once, like needles pressing into my skin from every direction. Then the whispers came, a wave of them, rushing in from all sides.

I let out a slow breath. I unclenched my fist. And I walked up the steps onto the stage.

The spotlights followed me as I moved from the floor to the platform. I let my gaze pass across the sea of unfamiliar faces below — and then found one I knew better than almost any other.

Lowell was seated in the guest section, rows back from the stage. His face caught the edge of the light — there, then half in shadow — and his eyes were fixed on me without blinking. What was in them I had never seen before: shock, disbelief, and something else beneath those that I could barely bring myself to name. A thread of grief. A thread of something that looked almost like relief.

He looked like a man who had been caught completely off guard and yet somehow had always known this was coming.

I had told him myself that I was leaving. And now here I was — standing on a stage beside another man, presented as a senior executive, while that man happened to be the same rival who had spent years making Lowell's life harder at every turn.

I looked away and didn't look back.

The weight of the room pressed in from all sides, a heat without a source. I stopped trying to read individual faces. I already knew what tonight meant: from this point forward, all the speculation would harden into fact. My presence up here was exactly the answer Adams had wanted to give the world.

When I began to speak, my voice came out steady.

The remarks had been prepared in advance — no real personality in them, nothing I needed to mean. I read to the end, smiled, dipped my head slightly, and walked back down the steps. Task complete.

Back in my seat, the world seemed to tilt. All the sounds in the room collapsed into a single high-pitched ringing. People spoke to me and I couldn't quite make out the words.

I kept thinking about the expression I had seen in the audience. That grief-stricken gaze. It was like something lodged between my ribs that I couldn't reach to pull out.

---

The signing ceremony gave way to a dinner banquet in an adjoining hall.

Everyone who mattered in this city had turned out — politics, business, press — and the room moved with the soft sounds of evening wear and champagne flutes and the comfortable, hollow pleasantries of people who had done this a hundred times before.

I stood at Adams's side with a glass in my hand and the right smile on my face — a smile that had been there so long it had stopped feeling like an expression and started feeling like a mask I couldn't peel off. He worked the room with ease, and occasionally he'd turn his head to look at me mid-conversation, just briefly, the way a man might glance at something to confirm it was still where he'd left it. Then back to handshakes and laughter and the next person in line.

"This is Miss Alina — my adopted daughter, and our newest addition to the group's senior leadership." When Adams introduced me to a property developer, his voice carried the easy pride of someone presenting a particularly successful acquisition.

I smiled, extended my right hand, exchanged a few words, and then stepped back half a pace behind Adams and fell quiet. My job here was to be seen.

The evening was exhausting in a way that went beyond tired. The sounds had been grinding at me for a while now — the lights, the music, the overlapping conversations, the endless ringing of glass against glass — all of it compressed inside my skull until the pressure behind my eyes was almost unbearable.

Eventually I set down my champagne, barely touched, and leaned slightly toward Adams. "I need to use the restroom."

He glanced over. No questions. A small nod. "Don't wander."

I nodded back, turned, and made my way through the crowd toward the corridor at the far end of the hall.

The noise fell away as soon as I left the main room. The corridor was quiet and warmly lit, wall sconces casting amber light across the carpet in soft pools. I walked until I reached a side door at the end and pushed through it onto a small terrace outside.

It was a modest space — a few evergreen planters, a railing strung with tiny lights that glowed warm against the dark. I crossed to the railing and placed both hands on the cold metal.

I exhaled.

The night air came in sharp and cold and filled my lungs all the way down, and the tightness behind my eyes eased, just slightly.

Then I heard footsteps behind me — fast, urgent — and two voices I would have known anywhere, both of them barely containing what they were carrying.

"Alina? Is that really you?"

I turned around.

Catherine and Megan stood at the entrance to the terrace.

Megan was in a deep navy gown, light makeup, the exhaustion and shock in her eyes fighting each other for space. She was looking at me the way you look at someone you're not sure you recognize anymore.

Catherine stood beside her in a dress she wouldn't normally wear to anything, her lips trembling slightly, like someone who has too much to say and no idea where to start.

"What are you doing here?" Megan's voice was strained. She closed the distance between us quickly and grabbed my arm, her grip harder than she probably meant it to be. "Do you have any idea how long Lowell has been looking for you? After you left the hospital he lost his mind trying to find you — he's been turning this entire city upside down!"

Catherine moved up alongside her, studying my face for a long moment before she spoke, her voice shaking. "We thought something had happened to you. Jason saw you at that café and went back and told Lowell, and Lowell didn't believe him — but then tonight, we all saw it ourselves." She stopped. "How are you standing next to Adams?"

Megan's fingers tightened on my arm. "Alina, have you lost your mind? Adams is our enemy — he's everyone's enemy. He's hurt you. He's hurt Lowell. You know all of this. How could you go over to his side?"

I met her eyes. I pulled my arm free, steadily, and took a step back — putting some distance between the two of them and me.

I knew they meant every word of it. The anger, the confusion — it all came from somewhere real. But I couldn't explain any of this to them. Not yet. I hadn't fully sorted through it myself.

"This isn't your business," I said, quietly. "While you still think of me as a friend — leave it alone."

"Not our business?" Megan's voice went up. The disbelief in it was almost palpable. "Alina, do you understand what you've done? Appearing in public at Adams's side is the same as telling this entire city you've gone over to the Charlecross family. What is Lowell supposed to think? What are the people who've been waiting for you supposed to think?"

"Is this because Lowell sidelined you? That's why you'd defect to the one enemy we all have in common?" Her voice was trembling now, her eyes full of a hurt she wasn't trying to hide. "After everything — do you really think that's who we are?"

I looked at her. The ache in my chest surged up against whatever was keeping it contained, pressing at the edges.

Before I could say anything, Catherine spoke again. "Do you know how much weight he's lost looking for you? Every night after he deals with the family business, he goes to that apartment in Brooklyn and just sits there until midnight. He's afraid you're in danger. He's afraid of pushing too hard. And meanwhile you walked away without a word and ended up with Adams."

I looked at both of them — the desperation in their faces, the loss — and I let out a long, slow breath.

"Fine," I said. "Since you want to know, I'll tell you."