Chapter 4

Julian finally spoke, his voice quiet but firm.

"That's enough."

He didn't look at Mia, but at his friends.

Marcus shrugged, a smirk still playing on his lips. "Just saying hi to an old friend, Jules."

"She needs to rest," Julian said.

They sauntered out, Kevin throwing a last, leering glance over his shoulder. "See ya around, Mia."

A brief reprieve. But it meant nothing.

Julian's intervention felt less like protection and more like a zookeeper managing his prized, broken animal.

After they left, the room was suffocatingly silent.

Mia stared at Julian, the full weight of her revised history with him crashing down.

He wasn't just her current tormentor. He was linked to her deepest trauma, to the night that had scarred her for life.

His failure to help her then, his presence with *them* afterwards, his casual friendship with them *now*...

It all pointed to one horrifying conclusion: he was complicit. He had always been.

The vague accusations about business and humiliation were a smokescreen. This, *this* was the core of it.

A new, more desperate terror filled her. She had to get away. Not just from the lake house, but from him, from all of them, from this entire web of pain.

The escape Eleanor Vance offered wasn't just an escape from recent events. It was an escape from a past that was actively, horrifyingly present.

This realization fueled her first escape attempt from the lake house, weeks before Eleanor's intervention, before the clinic.

It was a desperate, ill-planned flight.

She'd found a loose board in the basement window, worked at it for days with a piece of rusted metal.

One night, when Julian was upstairs, lost in whatever dark thoughts fueled him, she'd slipped out.

Into the cold Vermont night. Barefoot. Thin clothes.

Driven by pure, animalistic terror.

Freedom. The word was a prayer.

She ran, stumbling through the woods, branches tearing at her skin, her lungs burning.

The main road. If she could just reach the main road.

Julian received the news from one of the private security guards he'd hired to watch the perimeter of the isolated lake house property.

"She's gone, Mr. Vance. The basement window."

Julian's reaction was explosive.

He slammed his fist on the antique desk, scattering papers.

"Find her!" His voice was a roar. "Seal every road out of this county. Use whatever resources you need. I want her back. Now!"

His face was a mask of fury, his eyes blazing with a possessive rage that was terrifying to behold.

She was *his*. How dare she try to leave him?

He remembered the text message. The one he'd found on her burner phone after the charity gala, the one his "friends" had made sure he saw.

The one that had shattered his world and ignited his rage.

*"You're pathetic, Julian. Your grand gestures mean nothing. Everyone knows you're damaged goods. Stay away from me."*

He'd read it over and over, the words burning into his brain.

After he'd poured his heart out, after he'd thought they were building something real at Blackwood.

She'd mocked him. Publicly, or so he believed, thanks to Marcus's careful orchestration of the gala incident where his hearing aids supposedly malfunctioned at the exact moment she was "loudly rejecting" him.

His deepest insecurity, his hearing loss, thrown in his face.

He touched his right ear, the ever-present tinnitus a dull roar.

The result of a severe childhood infection, misdiagnosed, then poorly treated.

He'd hidden it for years, the expensive, discreet hearing aids his secret shield against a world that prized perfection.

Mia had been the first person since his diagnosis that he'd even considered telling.

He'd been on the verge of sharing that vulnerability with her at Blackwood, just before the gala.

And then she'd supposedly used it against him.

That, on top of the "leaked" business information that scuttled the Vance-Chen merger – a disaster also expertly pinned on Mia by his friends – had been too much.

It was a betrayal so profound, so personal, it had broken something inside him.

She hadn't just ruined his family's deal; she'd targeted his very essence, his carefully guarded flaw.

His quest for revenge had felt justified. Righteous, even.

He had to make her understand the pain she'd inflicted.