Chapter 32 – Ariane – The Breaking Point
I hear a buzzing first. It slithers into my dream and rattles around until I realize it isn’t a dream at all.
It’s my phone. My eyes feel glued shut; my vision’s a smear of shadows and digital glow.
I grope for the screen on the nightstand, knock over a glass of water, and finally manage to drag the phone toward me.
Julian.
If I weren’t half-asleep, I’d probably let it go to voicemail, pretend I never saw it. But muscle memory wins, and before my brain catches up, my thumb’s already swiped.
“Hello,” I rasp, voice rough, somewhere between sandpaper and confusion.
“Ariane,” he says, smooth as polished glass. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“You did,” I croak, shifting upright, sheets tangled around my legs like a bad decision. My heart’s doing that slow thud-thud of panic that hasn’t yet figured out if it’s warranted. “What do you want, Julian?”
“I want to fix what someone broke.” He exhales softly, like this pains him, like he’s practicing sincerity in a mirror.
“Those messages you saw… they weren’t mine.
Someone faked those screenshots. IT has been combing my backups, which will prove to you they never existed.
We traced it to a third-party relay. I sent it to you. It’s all there.”
My stomach pulls tight. “You’re saying you didn’t cheat.”
“I’m saying I would never be that stupid,” he says, and then, catching himself, adds, “I would never do that to you.”
Two beats of silence, then my phone buzzes in my ear like a hornet.
Texts pour in—screenshots, logs, metadata, timestamps and IPs with little red circles around them.
Another PDF is dropped. I ignored the first one.
This one’s labeled PROOF_final_FINAL2.pdf because men like Julian love redownloading files.
He’s still talking. “I’m sending you our report. Look at the log parity— there’s no matching data on my carrier records. You know me, Ariane. I’m careful. Someone set this up.”
Careful. He says it like a compliment to himself.
I say nothing because my mouth is busy being sand.
“If you want to meet tomorrow, I can—”
“I’ll look,” I say, voice thin. “Goodnight, Julian.”
“Ariane…”
“Goodnight.”
I hang up before he can say my name again.
For a minute I just sit there, the phone a small hot moon in my hand, the room washed the color of sleepless.
The house is quiet in that way it gets at night—like it’s holding its breath to hear who you become.
I open the first screenshot. It’s clinical, almost boring.
The kind of boring that changes your life.
He might be telling the truth.
The thought slices in, no drama, just the cut. If Julian’s telling the truth, then the story I used to justify everything—walking away from him, falling into Finn, letting myself be tied and taken and ruined—wasn’t true.
I didn’t fall because I was pushed. I jumped.
“Oh, God,” I say to the ceiling, because sometimes God is just drywall. My face is hot and my hands are cold and I can feel my heart trying to organize a riot.
I scroll. The report is tidy and smug. Someone with energy and horror movies in their soul made this. It shows exactly how the messages could've been injected. How the timing didn’t line up. How the network pings went missing for the most incriminating texts. It’s convincing. It makes sense.
And it sounds exactly like something Finn would do.
I press the heel of my hand into my chest as if I can hold the thought inside, pin it like a moth. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. Except he absolutely would. He’s the man who doesn’t go around obstacles when he can dismantle them, sell the parts, and build himself a throne.
I think again to the summer when I was twenty, watching Finn lean against a silver Mustang he’d bought with money he conjured from the internet and sheer willpower. Richard had been half impressed and half furious. Once Finn wants something, he gets it. No matter what.
I look at the anklet under my pajama hem like it might have advice. It keeps its own counsel, an elegant little secret hugging my ankle bone. It says nothing and it says everything: He wanted to know where you are. Always.
“Goddammit,” I whisper into the dark. My voice sounds small and angry and a little bit turned on, which is the most humiliating thing I have ever admitted even to myself.
I want to hate him. I want to love him. I am stuck in the middle of nowhere.
I walk towards his door and open the door.
No knocking or calling out his name. I’ve had enough.
He’s there, framed in lamplight, shirt rumpled, hair a mess that looks like a fight you want to join. He smells like soap and something mean. Those eyes, dark and silvered, find me and pin me to the threshold.
“Ariane.” His voice runs over my name like a palm over skin. “Couldn’t sleep?”
I hold the phone out because if I don’t hold it, I will grab his shirt and do something I can’t blame on insomnia. “Julian sent me this.”
He doesn’t look at it immediately. He looks at me. Then he takes the phone, thumb brushing my fingers, and some switch I didn’t consent to installing flips on.
I step back into the hall without meaning to, because everything inside me just leaned toward him and I need to remind myself which way forward is.
“Come in,” he says, not a question. He pivots, and I have to brush his chest to slide past. My body notices.
His room is all edges and expensive quiet. He flicks through the file with a patient thumb. His face doesn’t change. It rarely does. He’s the kind of man who can be furious and look bored. Then, he locks the phone and sets it on the desk like it’s a coaster.
“That’s thorough,” he says.
“That’s all you’re going to say?” My voice does a stupid thing where it tries to be steady and nearly manages it. “He says someone faked the screenshots I got sent. That the messages never existed.”
“Okay,” he says.
I blink. “Okay? So, you’re just…What? Admitting it?”
He tilts his head, eyes on mine, steady, infuriating. “He didn’t prove anything about who did it. He proved it could be done. We both know it can be done. It’s really not that hard, you know?”
“We both know you can do it,” I say, and the words taste like bitter in my mouth. “Did you?”
He doesn’t answer like a normal person. Of course he doesn’t. He steps into my space, slow, like he’s stalking a nervous animal that keeps walking willingly into his hands. He touches my chin with two fingers, tipping my face up. I should swat him away. I don’t.
“I want you to ask me the real question,” he says quietly. “Not the safe one.”
“Okay,” I snap, because if we’re dealing in real things, I might as well burn too. “Why? Why would you do that? Why would you break something to get to me? Wasn’t I already—I was already—” I have to swallow because my throat went on strike. “I wanted you.”
His mouth does a small, lethal curve that isn’t quite a smile. “Obviously, I know this.”
“God, you’re insufferable.” I try to pull back; he doesn’t let me. His fingers move to the side of my neck, not squeezing, just resting there like a promise with teeth.
“Do you trust your own wanting?” he asks.
“What does that even…”
“Do you need the permission slip of someone else’s mistake to make yours?” His thumb strokes once over my pulse. It jumps like an idiot. “Or do you want me without the story you tell yourself to make it palatable?”
“I don’t believe you,” I say. It comes out fast, practiced, a shield held up by habit. “I don’t. That’s what I’m supposed to say to protect the tiny scraps of my pride. So, I don’t believe you.”
His eyes soften in a way that is worse than any grin. “You do,” he says. “You just hate that fact.”
“I hate you,” I correct, because it’s easier than the other thing. “I hate that you think you can move pieces around and call it fate.”
“I don’t believe in fate,” he says. “I believe in leverage.”
“Right. So, did you do it?” I press, because if he won’t step on the landmine, I will throw it at his feet. “Tell me. Tell me you fabricated those messages. Tell me you decided to act like a puppet-master with my life. Tell me you broke up my engagement for yourself.”
He looks at me like I’m asking him to lie to make me feel better. Then, slowly, he shakes his head, once. Not no. Not yes. A refusal to play. His hand slides from my neck to my jaw, a gentler hold than I deserve right now.
“Julian is a man who would put you in glass and keep you polished,” he says softly. “That’s not safety. That’s display. He’d never cheat because cheating is sloppy. He’d cheat when it’s efficient.” He dips his head, so the words skim my mouth. “I don’t do efficient. I do inevitable.”
My insides light up like an electrical panel sparking before a blackout. “You’re fucking horrible.”
“You’re shaking,” he says, and the bastard sounds pleased and worried at the same time. “Come here.”
“I am here.”
“Closer.”
It isn’t a question. I step into him because not stepping would be an act of will I don’t have at this hour, in this room, with this man who ruins me without touching me and then insists on touching me anyway.
He folds me against him like he’s been holding the shape open in his body for days. Maybe he has. Maybe I have.
“Tell me it wasn’t you,” I whisper into the line of his throat. It feels like begging and I hate myself immediately. “Tell me I didn’t… that I didn’t do this because of a lie.”
His breath ghosts my ear; his mouth doesn’t. He rests his lips there like a refusal disguised as a kiss. “You came to me because you wanted to, and it was before those messages,” he says, low. “Not because Julian tripped.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one that matters.”
I pull back enough to see him. “It matters to me.”