Chapter 8 When the smoke fades

Chapter 8

When the Smoke Fades

For the first time in weeks, the air around Juliet felt still and very stable. Not silent totally, just still. The storm hadn't passed, at all, but it had, for now, pulled back into the shadows where. She sat alone in her study, the flash drive from Sophia untouched on the desk. The secrets it held still had weight, but not urgency. Not yet. It was the eye of a hurricane, calm, deceptive, dangerous in its own quiet.

Taylor Williamson wasn't the kind of man who lived in the shadows, but he did thrive in the reflection of others' illusions. A charming public figure with investments in high-end real estate and corporate holdings in three states, Taylor was the man people toasted at charity events without knowing what he was really capable of.

Taylor Williamson was a man who armbegorated himself with life. If the word did not exist before him, it ought to now-meaning something like dressing one's soul in the lushest, most confusing layers of living, not as armor, but as theater. Taylor wasn't one for the age of politics. That was a different kind of play that was performed by actors whose scripts were written in a deceitful color of ink. He, on the other hand, wore linen shirts that still smelled faintly of pine and old paper, and his gestures floated somewhere between poetry and rebellion. He drank rainwater from antique glasses. He smoked cigars only on Sundays while listening to Coltrane and imagining a world that hadn't fallen so completely to ambition.

He was supposed to be her husband's father. The girl-no, woman-was named Elise. She had kissed him once. Or perhaps she hadn't. The moment lived in that liminal space between memory and myth. A hallway drenched in silence. An open window. A tension so fragile it could have shattered if either of them had breathed too deeply.

He remembered the taste of longing more than her lips.

Taylor had seen too many people turn to politics like it was a religion. But Elise-she was something else entirely. The kind of woman who could put Taylor back in the fire just to see if his skin still knew how to burn. She had not married his son, not truly. No, not yet. And perhaps never. That was another illusion: the inevitability of things.

He had watched her walk through their family's estate gardens barefoot, a trail of white dress hem torn by rose thorns, her eyes wide with fury at a world she didn't ask to inherit. Her kiss-if it had happened-had not been romantic. It had been revolutionary. a concern. A demand. A storm without a name. Taylor felt a trembling in himself that he hadn't experienced since he was a young boy, when everything still felt unscripted. She had asked him once, "What do you believe in, Mr. Williamson?"

He had responded too quickly. He said, "Not in politics," at long last. "Then believe in me," she whispered. "Just once."

Taylor could not afford to believe in anything anymore. But Elise was not a thing. She was a promise-a dangerous, flickering, and impossibly human promise.

And when she disappeared two weeks before the wedding, with a single note that read "In echoes, you will find the truth", he understood what she meant. It wasn't about love. Or betrayal. It wasn't even about his son.

It was about what they had not said-and what still echoed in the silence.

So Taylor stood by the garden window each dusk, listening for footsteps that might never come, asking himself whether a kiss that may not have happened could change the trajectory of a man's entire life.

And whether, perhaps, it already had.

At his core, Taylor clinched tightly to anything in a skirt, his gaze often more honest than his mouth. He was addicted to the thrill, not just of sex, but of control. His affairs were not secrets-they were trophies. Patricia Hernandez, his current girlfriend, understood this. A savvy Latina with a sharp tongue and a silk wardrobe, she ensured Taylor was never without company. Especially company that made him feel younger, more virile, less married.

Patricia managed a revolving door of luxury escorts, each one carefully chosen to match Taylor's taste: statuesque, discreet, and skilled in the art of making powerful men feel worshipped. With her help, Taylor lived in an elevated version of reality-a permanent state of cloud nine, far from moral consequence.

What made Taylor especially dangerous, however, wasn't his appetite-it was his double standard. He judged women as possessions, his own wife most of all. Marlene Williamson was a glamorous socialite in the past, but years of emotional decline had dimmed her light. To Taylor, she was now a shadow, a duty he never wanted but kept for appearances. A woman he belittled with silence, and occasionally with words.

And yet, deep down, Taylor never quite forgot what Marlene had done-the affair that led to the birth of Sophia Williamson. He never spoke of it, but his resentment lived in the glances he cast at his daughter, the icy detachment, the unspoken disownment. Taylor had mastered the art of pretending she wasn't his. And while the world saw a blended, broken family stitched together by privilege, the truth was far crueler.

Taylor used power the way some men used knives-with subtlety and intent. He'd bankroll scandals to disappear, manipulate politicians with whispered favors, and use foundations to filter his guilt. But his greatest crime might have been his refusal to see Marlene as anything more than a burden. The woman who once loved him now lived like a ghost in their mansion.

The irony? Taylor was deeply afraid of being unimportant. His empire, his mistresses, his dominance-they were all desperate distractions from a hollow core. He wasn't a man who had it all. He was a man afraid of losing control.

And that fear would be his undoing.

The calm didn't last.

Two days after the café meeting, Juliet's phone lit up with an encrypted message: "They're watching Clarisse. Jones has vanished."

She knew what it meant-Lewis had escalated. Subtlety was no longer his weapon of choice.

Across town, Taylor Williamson entered his penthouse suite with two women in tow and a glass of aged whiskey in hand. Patricia, as usual, orchestrated the evening like a maestro, but something was different tonight. She'd seen the news. A leak. Offshore accounts. Dummy charities. The same ones Taylor used to silence his past.

"What's this?" he snapped when she showed him the article.

"Your sins are making headlines," she replied flatly.

Taylor's mask slipped for just a moment. His grin dissipated. He turned away, poured another drink, and muttered, "It's nothing I can't handle."

But he was wrong.

Juliet wasn't backing down.

And Sophia? She was done hiding.

The war had re-emerged, and this time it affected everyone personally.