Chapter 15
Grace
The aggressive knocking started at eight o’clock on Monday morning.
I groaned, burying my face in the pillows. I had managed exactly four hours of sleep after the raccoon incident, eventually crashing into a dreamless void just as the sun started to rise over the Queens skyline.
The knocking didn’t stop. It grew louder, more insistent.
I dragged myself out of bed, shivering slightly in the blast of the window AC. I ran a hand through my tangled hair as I walked out of the bedroom, still in the knee length t-shirt I’d had on when Dane had come to my rescue.
The living room was quiet. The oversized blanket was neatly folded on the arm of the sofa. Dane was standing by the small kitchen counter holding a mug of black coffee. He looked awake and unreasonably composed for a man who had slept on a lumpy three-seater sofa.
He raised an eyebrow as another volley of heavy knocks rattled the front door.
“Expecting someone?” he asked quietly.
“No,” I mumbled, rubbing my eyes. I walked past him and peered through the peephole.
My breath caught in my throat.
Adrian was standing in the hallway. He looked terrible. His usually impeccable suit was slightly rumpled, his tie loosened, a dark shadow of stubble along his jawline.
Panic flared in my chest. If I opened this door, I was letting the storm back inside. I glanced back at Dane, who was watching me closely. If I didn’t open the door, Adrian would likely break it down or stand in the hallway until someone called the cops.
“Will you wait in the bedroom?” I whispered to Dane. “Please. This is going to be ugly enough without an audience.”
Dane studied me for a long moment. Then he nodded once, picked up his coffee, and walked down the short hallway without a single question. The bedroom door swung most of the way shut behind him, stopping just short of the latch.
I took a deep breath, unlocked the deadbolt, and pulled the door open a foot.
“Adrian,” I said, my voice thick with sleep and tension. “What are you doing here?”
“Let me in, Grace,” he said, his voice raw. He gripped the edge of the door frame. “We need to talk.”
“No, we don’t,” I said, instantly defensive.
He came in anyway, shouldering past me into the middle of my living room. I shut the door before the whole floor could hear us and wheeled on him.
“I know about Celine. I know you moved her into the penthouse.”
Adrian flinched, closing his eyes for a brief second. “I can explain that. They found black mold in the HVAC system at her apartment and evicted her. I couldn’t put her in a hotel, she was hysterical. I put her in a guest room to contain the situation. It’s temporary.”
I put her in a guest room to contain the situation.
It was such a purely Adrian Wright response. Cold, strategic, managing the assets.
“It doesn’t matter, Adrian,” I said, my voice hardening. “It genuinely doesn’t matter where she lives. The geography isn’t the problem. The lie is the problem. The lie poisoned everything.”
“There is no lie! Not about what you think.” he insisted fiercely, stepping closer. “Grace, I swear to you on my life, an affair never happened. The recording was a manipulation.”
I stared at him. The absolute conviction in his eyes was staggering. He believed what he was saying. Or he was just that good at selling it.
“You never touched her,” I stated, my voice dropping to a dangerous whisper.
“Never,” Adrian swore.
“You never even kissed her?”
Adrian hesitated.
It was a microscopic fraction of a second. A tiny, imperceptible hitch in his breathing. The briefest flicker of panic in his dark eyes. A master negotiator, a man who could stonewall a boardroom of hostile investors without blinking, faltered for half a second.
But I had been married to him for seven years. I caught it.
The bottom dropped out of my stomach. The air in the room suddenly felt thin and suffocating.
“You kissed her,” I breathed. This time there was no question.
“Grace, listen to me,” Adrian started, the panic bleeding fully into his voice now. He took a step toward me, his hands rising, palms out. “It wasn’t what you think.”
“You kissed her!” I shouted, the fury finally erupting, hot and violent. I slapped his hands away. “You swore to me! You looked me in the eye and swore you never touched her!”
“I was asleep!” he yelled back. “My father was at the penthouse. We fought, and I drank too much afterward. I fell asleep in the library. She came in the dark, Grace. I was half-asleep. I thought she was you!”
“Don’t do that,” I sobbed, tears of pure, furious grief spilling over my cheeks. “Do not blame this on me! Do not drag me into your lies!”
“I am not lying! I thought it was you! I pulled away the second I realized it was her!”
“I don’t believe you!” I screamed, the sound tearing my throat. “Why should I believe anything you say? You lied about my eggs! You conceived a child and built a life on a foundation of absolute deceit! Why am I supposed to believe you now?”
“Because I love you!” Adrian roared, his voice echoing loudly in the small apartment.
The raw, ragged desperation in his tone finally stripped away the last remnants of the cool billionaire facade.
“Because since you left, I’ve been tearing myself apart trying to figure out how to fix this! Because I am drowning without you!”
The admission hung in the air between us, heavy and volatile.
He might be drowning. But he had tied the anchor around both of our necks.
“You can’t fix it,” I whispered, the fight suddenly draining out of me, leaving me utterly exhausted. “You broke it, Adrian. And it’s going to stay broken.”
I turned away from him, ready to open the front door, put him on the other side of it, and slide down the wall.
“Grace, please—”
“Is there a problem out here?”
The deep, calm voice came from directly behind me.
Adrian froze, his eyes snapping away from my face to look over my shoulder.
I turned around.
Dane had come out of the bedroom. He was standing a few feet behind me, holding his coffee mug. He was still wearing the same faded black t-shirt and jeans from last night. He looked large, relaxed, and immovable.
He looked like a man who had just spent the night in my apartment.
Adrian’s expression shifted. The raw, desperate grief vanished instantly, replaced by a cold, lethal fury that was far more terrifying than any of his boardroom tactics. The air between them crackled with sudden, violent electricity.
Adrian looked from Dane’s rumpled clothing to my sleep-tousled hair and oversized t-shirt.
The silence stretched, sharp enough to draw blood.
Then, Adrian’s eyes locked back onto mine. The desperation was gone. The love was gone. He looked at me with the absolute, chilling ruthlessness of a man who has just realized he is at war.