Chapter 277 146

Chapter 277 146
CHARLES had stopped answering the door which was a knew thing to his friends that new him very well. Charles had always been a man who moved towards people and always made himself the center of attraction in whatever room he entered because he understood instinctively that presence was money, and he had spent his whole life cashing it. But right now, he drowned in self hatred. With all the money he had made, or thought he had made, he never thought of getting a better place he could call his, instead of crashing at his friend's whenever he felt he needed a little luxury. Who knew this would happen?!

His phone rang on the nightstand and he went to switch it off as usual, until he saw the caller ID and his hands hovered around the phone for a few seconds. He debated on picking the call from his estranged brother, but later agreed.

"What are you calling me for? To mock?" Charles voice was harsh. He had not spoken to his brother in years, and the only time he deemed it necessary to call was when he had been publicly humiliated.

"Not quite." His brother's voice was low. "It's actually two things... To mock you, and to give you a piece of advice."

The second part came as a surprise to him. Even when the 'mocking' was mentioned, Charles had not expected the call to last this long.

"Get it over with. I have some things to do." He lied through his teeth.

"You have soiled the family's name." He said harshly. "So, I hope, for your own sake and my own sake that you clean this up immediately. Everyone who knows you are connected to our family has been calling mom and dad for weeks now, and you know how much I hate bad attention on this family." His voice has grown darker, and Charles could feel a spike of fear in his chest.

He knew what his brother was capable of. And he would hurt him, Charles, without batting as much as an eye.

"If you can't do it, then give me the names of everyone involved." His brother's voice had gotten colder which made Charles shiver.

"I... I will handle it. Before the month is over. I will do it myself. Discredit their credibility." Charles voice shook towards the end, and he waited.

"You have two weeks, Charles." After that, the line went dead. 

The phone slipped from his hands and fell to the floor after the call. His knees went weak, and he had to hold on to the edge of his bed unless he fell.

He thought about the people he realized were behind his downfall. Marcus. Julian. Sandra. Amelia. Amelia's daughter, Hazel. Her best friend, Amaka. And the man who worked for Amelia... What was his name again? Tyler? Ryan?

The traitor, Marcus, had come twice. The first time, Charles answered but didn't let him past the hallway, and the conversation lasted six minutes and ended with Charles saying he was fine and Marcus clearly not believing him but also clearly not knowing what to do with that. The second time, Charles simply didn't answer, and stood on the other side of the door listening to Marcus knock for two full minutes before the footsteps retreated.

He told himself he wasn't ready for company, especially from one of the men who could have betrayed his trust by revealing his secret to Amelia and Sandra. He knew it was going to be one of them because he had told them everything.

He told himself a lot of things in those weeks. He told himself the video would fade, that his reputation was more durable than one bad news cycle. He told himself he would rebuild... had he not built everything he had from nothing before? Had he not always found another route when one closed? He was Charles. He was resourceful. He was strategic. He had been knocked down before and he had always, always gotten back up.

But the getting-up required something... some foothold, some surface to push against... and every surface he reached for crumbled. The business contacts had gone cold in the particular way of people who returned your messages with increasing delay until the delays became silence. The money was gone in a direction he couldn't reverse. The projects he had been juggling were exposed now as the half-built things they had always been. And the women... the two women who had been, if he was honest with himself in the way he almost never was, the architecture of his entire plan, were gone. Both of them. They would soon be gone for good, he told himself this time.

He thought about Amelia constantly. Not with love though. He was honest enough with himself now, in the stripped-down privacy of his ruined life, to admit that what he had felt for Amelia had been structured primarily around what she represented. Her resources, her stability, her unshakeable competence. The way people looked at him when he was beside her. The way she made him feel, by proximity, like a man of a certain standing.

But he thought about her with something that had started as an obsession and was slowly, dangerously, becoming something else.

He thought about the ring on the coffee table. The way she had placed it there without any drama, without tears, without giving him anything to argue against. The calm in her voice. The fact that she had known... had apparently known for weeks and had said nothing, had continued moving through their relationship with that composed, watchful intelligence while he remained completely, humiliatingly unaware.

That was the part he kept coming back to. The humiliation of it. It was a Tuesday evening when he drove past Sandra's building for the first time. He told himself he was just driving. He told himself he had no intention of stopping. He drove past it twice and then sat three streets away from her house for forty minutes before driving home.

He went back on Thursday, and again the following Monday.

Sandra.... She had called him a coward in the days immediately after. She had sent a message that simply said he should never contact him again.

He hadn't. He hadn't contacted her directly. But he drove past her house, and something was building in the quiet of his apartment and the ruin of his plans, something that looked like anger and felt like intention, and he was not examining it closely enough to know what it actually was.

He sat on his kitchen floor on a Wednesday night with a drink he didn't finish and thought about Amelia out there in her house with her children and her businesses and her unbothered composure, moving forward without him as though he had been nothing more than a brief interruption.

He thought about the man in her kitchen that Saturday morning. The easy way he had reached for the fridge. The way Amelia had said 'he's staying here for a few weeks' with a calm that told him she had not felt any need to justify it.

"She moved on," he said aloud to the empty kitchen. The more he said it, the more hollowness he felt in his chest.

He was going to finish this. Once and for all.