Chapter 10 #3
If she wanted to shield her sister...
She would pay the price instead.
I had always prided myself on my instincts. The razor-sharp intuition that had carried me from the gutter to an empire built on blood and leverage. I survived because I trusted my gut when others hesitated.
But when it came to Elena, those instincts betrayed me.
Or so I believed.
I convinced myself her marriage to me had been a coincidence.
The narrative hardened quickly.
She wasn’t confused. She wasn’t trapped.
She was a spy.
A serpent coiled inside my home, breathing poison into my air, watching me from behind lowered lashes while she relayed my weaknesses to the woman who had taken everything from me.
My fury ignited like wildfire.
And this time, I didn’t try to put it out.
In the past, my rage would have demanded immediate, personal retribution.
I knew exactly how it would have played out. I’d done it before, countless times.
I could see it with brutal clarity—my hands closing around her throat, thumbs pressing into the fragile column of her windpipe, feeling the pulse flutter beneath my skin.
The moment when fear would finally replace defiance in her eyes. The instant when life would drain from her gaze and justice—cold, absolute—would be served.
That was how men like me settled accounts.
But this time, something stopped me.
Not mercy. Not forgiveness. Something far more dangerous.
Restraint.
It gnawed at me, this inexplicable hesitation, even as my anger burned hot enough to cauterize reason. I told myself it was strategy, that getting my hands dirty would be sloppy. Emotional. Beneath me.
Yet the truth was uglier: I couldn’t bring myself to touch her. Not in rage. Not in punishment. Not in any way that would harm her.
So I chose prison instead.
Control without proximity.
We already had the groundwork laid.
Fabricated evidence. Forged documents. False financial trails. Witness statements rehearsed and planted like landmines. All pointing toward Elena as the architect behind Maria’s murder.
It was effortless to feed it to my contacts inside law enforcement. A nudge here. A sealed envelope there. Names whispered into the right ears.
The system responded exactly as it always did—efficient, obedient, blind to truth when wrapped in credibility.
Before dawn, they stormed the club she went to every night.
She didn’t fight.
Didn’t scream.
Didn’t run.
They cuffed her wrists, read her rights, and led her out as if the verdict had already been decided.
By the next day, the case was sealed tight: first-degree murder, conspiracy, obstruction of justice. Clean charges. Heavy charges. The kind prosecutors loved. The kind that almost never fell apart.
By noon, she was transferred to Blackridge Correctional Facility.
A maximum-security graveyard.
Processed. Filed away.
Out of sight.
At first, I felt something dangerously close to triumph.
I sat alone in my study, scotch burning down my throat, watching the fire crackle in the hearth.
Justice served, I told myself. Balance restored. I imagined Maria’s ghost finally at peace, my unborn child avenged.
But the satisfaction didn’t last.
It curdled.
From the moment the cell door slammed shut behind Elena, my world began to hollow out. The nightmares returned with a vengeance—but not the familiar ones. Not Al-Chapo’s dungeons. Not the starvation or the beatings or the psychological torture designed to erase my name.
Those memories had been bad enough.
Now they were worse.
Elena invaded them.
Her face emerged from the darkness—pale, hollow-eyed, staring at me with an accusation so sharp it split my chest open. She never screamed. Never begged. She just looked at me, disappointment and betrayal carved into every line of her expression.
I woke night after night drenched in sweat, heart hammering, hands grasping at empty sheets. Reaching for someone who wasn’t there. Someone I had put behind concrete and steel with my own hands.
I thought distance would cure me.
I was wrong.
She was still my wife—an irony bitter enough to choke on. Ending it would have been easy. Divorce papers drawn up in an afternoon. I could have gone to the prison myself, slid them across a metal table, watched her sign. Clean. Final.
Freedom for both of us.
The thought never once crossed my mind.
Instead, her absence became a constant ache, a phantom limb I couldn’t stop feeling.
She haunted my waking hours just as thoroughly as my sleep. I remembered the way she’d look at me when she thought I wasn’t watching—chin lifted in quiet defiance, eyes betraying vulnerability she refused to acknowledge.
The way she drank alone night after night in that club, drowning sorrow without a single soul to lean on.
No family.
No friends.
Only me.
And I had crushed her.
The realization seeped in slowly, then all at once: I hadn’t just imprisoned her body. I’d condemned her to isolation. To fear. To a hell she was never built to survive.
The depression followed.
At first, it was subtle—missed meetings, unanswered calls, decisions delayed. Then it became impossible to ignore. I drifted through my own empire like a ghost, present in name only.
Deals collapsed. Arms shipments vanished into rival hands. Longstanding alliances began to fray.
My lieutenants noticed.
They whispered behind closed doors, their concern edging dangerously close to doubt. But I ignored them, sinking deeper into a fog of self-inflicted misery, nursing drinks I no longer tasted, staring at security feeds I no longer cared to monitor.
The empire I’d forged with blood and iron was crumbling.
And I let it.
In my misery, I checked again.
Not because I expected anything new—just habit.
A final sweep. A pointless double-check.
The kind I’d done a thousand times before closing a file, making sure nothing could come back later.
I told myself it was routine.
Not hope. Not guilt.
But the moment I breached her old phone records again, something felt... off.
There it was—the message. The same incriminating line that had sealed her fate months ago.
The same string of words I’d stared at in righteous fury, convincing myself it was proof of betrayal. Only this time, I didn’t stop there. I peeled the data back layer by layer, tracing metadata, timestamps, keystroke patterns.
And the truth crawled out of the shadows.
The reply hadn’t been sent by Elena.
The IP signature didn’t match her usage habits.
The typing cadence was wrong—too fast, too careless. Whoever had written it hadn’t hesitated, hadn’t paused the way she always did when she was uncertain. It was crude. Opportunistic.
My blood turned to ice.
I followed the trail further, reconstructing movements, cross-referencing surveillance from the club.
And then I saw him—the sleazy bastard who hovered around her like a scavenger whenever she drank too much.
The one I’d dismissed as insignificant. He’d been close enough to swipe her phone. Close enough to type a sentence that would damn her.
But he hadn’t acted alone.
The deeper I dug, the clearer the web became. Payments routed through shell accounts. Burner phones bouncing signals between continents. And there—like a festering wound that refused to heal—was Harris Thompson.
Her ex-fiancé.
That smug, entitled piece of shit who’d never forgiven her for walking away. Who’d watched her marry me and decided if he couldn’t have her, no one would.
Harris and her sister—still allied, still scheming, still feeding my rage with carefully curated lies.
I broke.
The scream tore out of me without warning, ripping my throat raw as I slammed my fist into the wall.
Once. Twice. Again.
Bone cracked. Pain exploded, white-hot and meaningless. Blood smeared the plaster, but I barely noticed. I welcomed it. I wanted it.
This was the lie.
This was the lie that had condemned an innocent woman to hell.
Elena had never sent that message.
She had never contacted her sister. Not once. Not in any way.
She had done nothing to betray me.
And yet... I had sentenced her to a lifetime behind bars.
Guilt hit harder than any blade, twisting deep in my gut, relentless.
I wanted to turn it inward, carve myself open until the agony matched what I’d done to her.
Images flooded my mind unbidden—Elena sitting on the thin, stained mattress, the gray walls pressing in so tightly it felt like they were breathing down her neck, shivering under a threadbare blanket, curling into herself as the cold seeped into her bones.
Meals went uneaten or were barely enough to keep hunger at bay.
Abandoned. Betrayed. Scraping by on nothing but stubborn survival.
I had taken what little safety she had left and burned it to the ground.
I didn’t think. I didn’t hesitate.
“Release her,” I bellowed into the phone, my voice cracking as something feral clawed its way out of my chest. “Now. You hear me? Now.”
I sent everything—logs, timestamps, corroborated trails, proof of manipulation so airtight it could drown a judge in shame. I pulled strings so hard they threatened to snap. Prosecutors scrambled. Warrants were amended. Orders flew.
And then there was nothing to do but wait.
Now I stood outside Blackridge Correctional Facility, the wind cutting through my coat like knives as I paced the gravel lot.
My hands clenched and unclenched, knuckles wrapped in fresh bandages that were already seeping red. Nine months. Nine fucking months in a place designed to destroy people piece by piece.
Even a week in there could break someone.
What had I done to her?
The question hollowed me out. No amount of money, no empire, no groveling apology could ever erase what she’d endured. Would she even look at me without loathing? Would she scream? Spit in my face? Pray I died?
I deserved all of it.
The massive iron gates finally groaned open, the sound low and ancient, like the jaws of some prehistoric beast reluctantly releasing its prey.
Floodlights snapped on, bleaching the twilight, casting long, grotesque shadows across the razor wire.