Chapter 3

Eliana POV

I packed a single bag.

Just the essentials: clothes, my laptop, and the vintage Nikon camera I hadn't touched in years-a relic from a life I used to own.

I left the keys on the marble counter.

I left the platinum credit cards he gave me, abandoning the plastic tether of his control.

Without looking back, I walked out of the penthouse and flagged down a taxi.

"Where to?" the driver asked.

"Anywhere but here," I whispered, my voice trembling, before giving him Sarah's address.

Sarah opened her door and didn't ask questions.

She just pulled me into a hug that smelled like lavender and safety.

I stayed there for three days.

I kept my phone off, a black brick of silence.

I drank cheap wine and cried until my eyes were swollen shut.

Then, on the fourth day, I woke up and the tears were gone.

I felt light.

Hollow, perhaps, but undeniably light.

I picked up my camera.

I walked around Sarah's neighborhood, capturing images of the mundane and the broken: cracked pavement, weeds forcing their way through concrete, the morning light hitting a rusted fire escape.

It felt like breathing after holding my breath underwater for fifteen years.

Sarah came home from work and found me editing photos on my laptop.

"He's looking for you," she said, dropping her purse onto the couch with a weary sigh.

"I know."

"He called me. He sounded... annoyed."

"Not worried?"

"He asked if you were done throwing your tantrum."

I laughed. It was a dry, rasping sound, like dead leaves skittering on pavement.

"He thinks I'll come back because I need him."

"Do you?"

"I need oxygen. I don't need him."

I opened a browser tab.

Dustin's face was plastered on the front page of a tech news site.

Tech Mogul Dustin Powell on the Future of AI.

I clicked the video.

He was sitting on a stage, radiating that practiced, visionary charisma.

The interviewer asked him about his support system.

"I have an incredible team," Dustin said, smiling. "Especially my creative director, Jami. She's my muse. She knows what I need before I do. Just last week, she had a crate of macadamia nut cookies flown in because she knows they're my favorite."

I froze.

Macadamia nuts.

My throat tightened just hearing the words. I was deathly allergic.

For fifteen years, those nuts had been banned from our home. A singular, non-negotiable rule.

He knew that.

Or at least, I thought he knew that.

"She's indispensable," Dustin continued, his eyes softening as he looked off-camera.

I slammed the laptop shut.

It wasn't that he forgot.

It was that he simply didn't care enough to remember.

He had replaced my safety with her cookies.

My phone, which I had finally turned on, pinged.

It was a text from Dustin.

Stop playing games. Come home. The house is a mess and I can't find my passport.

Then another one.

Jami is trying to help, but she doesn't know where things are. You're being selfish.

Selfish.

I gave him my youth. I gave him my inheritance. I sacrificed my art at his altar.

And he called me selfish because he couldn't find a passport.

I typed a reply.

The passport is in the safe. The combination is the date you founded the company. Not our anniversary. You never changed it.

I didn't hit send.

Instead, I deleted the message.

I stood up and grabbed my coat.

"Where are you going?" Sarah asked.

"I need to go back," I said.

"Eliana, no."

"Not to stay," I said, my voice hardening into steel. "I left something behind. Something that doesn't belong to him."

"What?"

"My mother's ring."

Sarah looked at me, worried.

"Do you want me to come with you?"

"No. I need to do this alone. I need to see him one last time, without the rose-colored glasses."

I walked out into the cool evening air.

I wasn't returning to a home.

I was returning to a crime scene to collect the evidence.