Chapter 5 The cracks in the marble

Chapter 5

Cracks in the Marble

The air in Lewis's mansion felt heavier now for Juliet noticed, how the shadows lingered longer than the marble floor, how silence curled beneath the grand chandelier like a sleeping predator, even though the roses in the foyer began to droop, as if, it is under the weight of unspoken truths. Though the rumors had momentarily dimmed, their embers still glowing. And somewhere in that lull, Juliet dared to breathe again. But peace was never promised, only postponed.

Anderson Williamson entered Juliet's life not like a hurricane in her life, but a slow, sickly rot beneath a silk surface around her. He was the product of old money and bad choices with her, a spoiled heir of the Williamson estate that name going before him, known for its shipping empires and scandal-laced summer parties in a beach. Juliet had met him at one of these events back then, when she was still learning on how to breathe through champagne and suppressing the impulse to run.

Anderson had a face that newspapers liked and a soul that even mirrors recoiled from him. His charm was laced with venoms, his smiles often stretching just wide enough to hide that jagged teeth of his intentions. While others saw a flamboyant flirt in him, Juliet saw something worse: a predator with taste and bad blood.

He was notorious for treating women like accessories in his life, discarding them as easily as he picked wallet. His whispered nickname in the elite circle was "the tap", not for his wealthhe owns, but for his inability to shut up, especially about his conquests for Juliet, which she had once overheard him boast in the smoking room: "If a girl doesn't scream my name by midnight, I change the melody. in a song"

His flirtations weren't laced with desire, they were demands. Demands that are rooted in the archaic belief, that classless women should feel honored to be noticed by him. He saw women not as people in life, but as reflections of his own power he has acquired. It was slavery of the psychological kind, a twisted control he exercised beneath, a layer of sarcasm and expensive cologne.

Juliet remembered the first time he turned his attention towards her. She had worn a black velvet gown with nothing inside but a gold clasp and her signature silence. Anderson took her quiet as an invitation to his place.

"You wear your silence like lingerie, he said" he had murmured to her about having sex with her, too close she said, his breath full of gin and gall due to her frustrations to get into her.

She didn't respond to him.

That infuriated him so much.

From then on, his behavior changed towards her, to mockery. He found ways to degrade her in public without saying her name, calling her "Miss Ghost," or "the stoic statue because of her attitude." He told mutual acquaintances she had once begged him for sex, to be seen by men like he is all deserving, that her coldness was just a mask for desperation towards him.

But Juliet was not cold toward him, she was only being cautious, because of his desperations and attitude towards women.And Anderson was not a man, he was an infection in human form moving.

Behind the scene is being filled with women in his room, whose faces wore pleasure but whose eyes hinted at something else, resignation, discomfort, and unspoken ache of being reduced to less than a human. Rumors abounded that Anderson had slept with five women in a role, one weekend and kept photographs as trophies for them.

He made Juliet his public antagonist, his hate, born from rejected advances, to bruised egos, that grew into calculated disdain. Every time he passed her, he muttered somethin, never loud enough to provoke a scene, but enough to poison the air in which she dwell.

"She's just a warmed-up scandal he refers to her like that," he told people. "Sooner or later, we will all end up seeing the cracks in her."

And still, Juliet endured it.

But Mario's return made things worse with her.

Anderson, sensing a disturbance in Juliet's life, composure, latched onto it like a leech. He accused her of being a "nostalgic for dirt," telling friends that Juliet's flirtation with her past, proved she never really belonged here with her family.

"She might wear diamonds" he sneered,that she'll always be from dust."

It wasn't just words he said. But he began leaking snippets of her life before Lewis, old photos, unverifiable rumors about her, bits of personal histories, only someone digging deep could uncover it,

Anderson had the access.

And a vendetta to her rejections.

When Juliet confronted him at a dinner party they were both together, her voice steady but her hands trembling because of rage, he laughed. "Careful, Juliet," he whispered, "You raise your voice to me, and the whole room will remember you don't belong here with us"

Juliet stood at the edge of the ballroom, with champagne flute untouched, eyes fixed on the man, that is across the room. Anderson's laugh cracked through the music like glass under pressure. He was holding court again, two models hanging on his elbows, and three more waiting,to be turn.

Mario had returned quietly to his house. He hadn't entered the room when Juliet felt his presence like static on her skin trying to penetrate her. His gaze was somewhere in the shadows where he has always being, and she could feel it pressing against her spine.

Anderson spotted her immediately.

He raised up his glass. A smile like a sliver of broken mirror on his face.

Juliet turned away, but not before he sauntered over.

"Enjoying the gala night?" he asked. "No envelopes on your mirror tonight they all laugh?"

She flinched.

"Oh, come now please We all have ghosts with us. Yours just tend to wear cheap shoes with him."

Juliet steadied herself.and said "You sound jealous."

Anderson's eyes darkened so much. "Of him? No. Of you? Maybe because you have always begged for me."

He leaned closer. "Because even when you're about to lose everything, you still think you have dignity."

Before she could reply to him, a low voice from behind her,interrupted.

"She does have dignity to her name. You just don't know what it looks like yet."

It was Mario.

Anderson blinked his eyes, recognizing him for the first time he heard it. The tension snapped like a wire between them to face.

Juliet stood between two men, one with the power to ruin her, the other with the power to remind her who she once was back then.

The music didn't stop. But everything else did in the gala night.

The reckoning was no longer a beginning .

It had just arrived.