CHAPTER FIVE
There was an entire gleaming pyramid of champagne flutes, and Paul was about to become intimately acquainted with every last one.
But first, the settlement offer, delivered over lunch at a marina restaurant with linen napkins and a view expensive enough to make grown men weep.
Martin sat beside her, silent and watchful, while Paul talked numbers large enough to make most people's ears ring.
Paul had chosen the venue deliberately, Martina suspected. It was somewhere public enough that she'd feel pressure to behave, private enough that no one could prove what was discussed. He'd always been good at that kind of math, the calculation of exactly how much witness a room needed.
"Sign the NDA," Paul said, sliding a folder across the table like this was just another sponsorship deal.
"Step away from the foundation quietly. Take the responsibility publicly for the incident at the arena.
" He named a figure that would have made the old Martina—the one who'd married him at twenty-six believing in things like forever—light-headed with relief.
The new Martina looked at the folder like it was something she'd need a glove to touch.
"That's generous," she said, "for a man asking me to publicly apologize for catching him mid-affair wagging his dick around."
"It's generous for a man who could make the next decade of your life very difficult," Paul said, and there it was, the mask slipping just enough to show the threat underneath the smile.
Paul tried nostalgia first, reminding her of their wedding, their first house, the years before all this. When that didn't land, he tried anger, then threats about what she'd lose. When none of that worked either, he reached for humiliation, the last tool left in his box.
"You know why Mercer's really interested?" Paul said, leaning back, sneer fully deployed. "Sleeping with the captain's discarded wife. That's the ultimate revenge for a guy who spent his whole career standing in my shadow."
Martina picked up her water glass with every intention of throwing it directly into his smug, symmetrical face. But Martin's hand landed gently over hers before she could.
"We're declining," Martin said, calm as a man reading a weather report.
Martina set the glass down, unspilled, and felt almost proud of herself for it.
That was when Cassidy arrived. Uninvited, apparently, judging by how fast Paul's expression shifted from smug to alarmed. She'd been told this was a private meeting with his agent. It was, evidently, not.
Martina watched composure crack across Cassidy's face as the truth settled in, that Paul, even now, was still fighting to keep his marriage intact on paper, still treating Cassidy as the thing to be managed rather than chosen.
For one unguarded second it looked like grief before hardening back into fury.
The fight that followed was loud enough to draw the ma?tre d'. Paul and Cassidy went at each other across the table in furious, overlapping accusations while half the restaurant discreetly filmed it on their phones. That was simply what happened whenever the Weddingtons occupied the same room now.
Martina used the distraction to leave. Paul followed her out onto the marina walkway, grabbing her arm hard enough that she felt it later, right where his fingers had been on the car door in a different, oddly worse version of this same argument.
Gabe was there before Martina had to do anything about it. He'd been waiting nearby at the corner of the bar at Martin's quiet insistence, close enough to intervene, far enough to give her room to try things her own way first.
Paul swung at him.
Gabe took the hit and answered with one clean shot that sent Paul stumbling backward into a waiter's cart, an entire gleaming pyramid of champagne flutes going down with him in a crash that turned every head on the dock.
Gabe didn't follow it up. He stood there, fists loose at his sides, clearly done, while Paul scrambled upright wiping champagne and broken glass off his sleeve.
"You want to hit someone your own size?" Paul spat, though Gabe had a good three inches and twenty pounds of muscle on him, which made the line land less like a threat and more like a man who'd stopped thinking clearly some time ago.
Paul grabbed a decorative oar off the wall like a man in a bad action movie and swung it wildly at both of them.
Martina stepped back out of range on instinct, some distant, functioning part of her brain noting that of all the ways she'd imagined this marriage ending, being menaced with restaurant decor had never once come up.
Martina, for reasons she would later describe to absolutely no one as strategic, found the release lever for the floating section of dock and pulled it.
Paul went into the marina backward, mid-swing, oar and all.
The splash was spectacular. The screaming—his, mostly, though a few onlookers contributed enthusiastically—was even better.
Dozens of diners filmed the captain of the Miami Breakers thrashing in six feet of water, hurling threats at his wife, while his hundred-dollar shirt ballooned around him like a jellyfish.
Martina stood at the edge of the dock and, for the first time in a week, felt nothing but blissful, carefree calm.
Somewhere behind her, a bartender was loudly narrating the scene to a friend on the phone, using the phrase "you will not believe this" no fewer than four times.
A busboy was filming with the dedicated focus of someone who understood he'd just captured content that would outlive his entire career in food service.
Martin, to his credit, said nothing at all, though Martina caught him checking his own phone was recording before quietly pocketing it again.
"I'm done reacting," she told Gabe, watching Paul flail his way toward the ladder. "Whatever happens next, I want to choose it. The time. The place. All of it."
Gabe looked at her for a long moment, respect settling into his expression.
"The contract event's been rescheduled," he said.
"Full arena. Cameras, sponsors, the works.
They wouldn't cancel it without proof, and Paul's been telling anyone who'll listen the footage only shows an argument with his wife. "
"Let him keep telling them that." Martina watched Paul reach the ladder, miss it, and go under again to a fresh round of laughter from the crowd gathered along the rail. "It'll make the actual footage hit so much better."
"You do understand what you're asking for?" Gabe said. "Not a leak or a lawyer's letter. Him, on the ice, in front of everyone who still believes in him."
"I built that image," Martina said. "I get to be the one who takes it apart."
Martina watched Paul finally reach the ladder and pull himself up, soaked and screaming and utterly, publicly ruined for the second time in a week.
"That's where it ends," she said.