Chapter One #3
"I'm already disconnecting," Kinsley’s voice was small now, a bruised, fragile whisper that shattered Marcy's heart. "I'm sorry. I'm gone."
The screen flashed back to the standard Lancaster-Tate logo. The boardroom returned to its oppressive silence.
"Is there anything else, Ms. Dane?" Cruz asked, stepping back and brushing a non-existent speck of dust from his sleeve, a gesture of dismissal.
"No, sir," Marcy whispered. She picked up her briefcase.
Her hands were shaking, but she refused to let them see it.
She refused to give them the satisfaction of seeing her break.
She had done all her breaking two years ago in the hospital waiting room, while they had all formed a wall of grief that explicitly excluded her.
"Then you are dismissed." Kade picked up his tablet again, his eyes returning to the screen.
Marcy turned and walked toward the glass doors. Every step felt like walking over broken glass. She didn't look back as she pulled the door open and stepped out into the hallway, the muted chime of the elevator sounding like a death knell in her ears.
Back in the boardroom, Kade and Cruz remained silent for a long moment.
"Leon called this morning," Kade finally said, his voice softer now, the lethal edge dulling into something lined with fatigue. He rubbed the bridge of his nose, the immaculate facade cracking just a fraction.
Cruz looked up, his expression softening only slightly at the mention of Kade's younger brother. "And?"
"He visited the hospital yesterday evening. Before his flight to London." Kade turned back to look out the window at the sprawling city that they owned, a city that felt empty. "He said she looked peaceful. The doctors said there’s no change in brain activity. Just... peaceful."
Cruz walked over to the mahogany sideboard and poured two fingers of amber scotch into a crystal glass. He didn't usually drink before evening, but the presence of Marcy Dane in his office always left a foul, bitter taste in his mouth. A taste of betrayal.
"My mother is organizing the charity gala for the neurological wing next month," Cruz said quietly, taking a slow sip of the scotch. "She wants to dedicate the new pavilion in Gabriela’s name."
"My parents will be pleased," Kade replied, his eyes fixed on the horizon.
He pictured Gabriela—her golden hair, her serene smile, the way she used to glide through the Lancaster estate gardens with an effortless grace that made the world seem a little brighter.
She had been the glue that held their volatile, high-pressure lives together.
She had been the ideal. The perfect future they had all envisioned.
"It makes me sick," Cruz murmured, his grip on the crystal glass tightening until his knuckles were white. "Knowing that they are still here. Breathing our air. Working in our company. Living their lives, while Gabriela is trapped in that bed."
Kade didn't reply immediately. He thought of the deep, bruised exhaustion he had seen in Marcy’s eyes just moments ago.
A flicker of something—doubt, perhaps, or a phantom pain of a severed childhood bond—tried to surface in his chest. But he crushed it instantly, encasing it back in the steel vault of his heart.
"We endure them, Cruz. Because Arthur Monroe asked us not to make a public spectacle," Kade said coldly. "But we don't have to forgive them. We will never forgive them."
***
Down on the twentieth floor, Marcy sat at her small, isolated cubicle in the corner of the data analytics department. The screen in front of her was a blur of numbers and projections.
Her phone buzzed on the desk. She reached out with a trembling hand and answered it, pressing the device to her ear.
"Kins?"
"I'm sorry, Marcy," Kinsley’s voice came through the speaker, thick with unshed tears. "I just wanted to help. I didn't want him to yell at you. I’m so stupid, I should have known he would just..."
"You're not stupid, Kinsley," Marcy said fiercely, her voice dropping to a harsh whisper to avoid the prying ears of her colleagues. "Don't you ever say that. You are brilliant, and you are kind, and you are my sister. Do you hear me?"
A small sniffle echoed over the line. "I hear you."
"Cruz Tate is a miserable, cold-hearted bastard," Marcy said, the words tasting like ash in her mouth. "They both are. They are so blinded by their perfect memory of Gabriela that they can't see the reality of the world anymore. We just have to survive them, Kins. That's all we do."
"It just hurts," Kinsley whispered, the childlike innocence in her voice fractured by the cruelty of the men they had once looked up to. "Why does it still hurt, Marce? After two years, shouldn't it stop hurting?"
Marcy closed her eyes, a single tear escaping and tracking a hot path down her cheek. She thought of Kade's cold, dead eyes looking through her as if she were nothing but air.
"I don't know, Kins," Marcy breathed, her hand gripping the edge of her desk to anchor herself in reality. "I really don't know."