Chapter 3

The next morning, the city felt alien, hostile.

Olivia was stable but unconscious at UCLA Medical Center. The bills were already piling up.

I had to confront Isabella, had to understand the depths of this.

Her law firm was a glass and steel monolith in Century City, a monument to ambition and power.

I didn't have an appointment, I just walked in, past the startled receptionist, heading for Isabella' s corner office.

The door was slightly ajar. I heard her voice, sharp, commanding.

I stopped, listening.

"The slush fund is for contingencies like this," Isabella was saying to someone, her tone impatient. "Pay off anyone who might have seen Marcus near that alley, I want them gone or silent."

My breath caught.

"And the UCLA payments for Olivia?" a younger female voice asked, hesitant.

Isabella' s reply was like ice.

"Delay them, stall them, create as many bureaucratic hurdles as possible. The pressure needs to build on Ethan, make him desperate. If he thinks he can' t afford her care, he might just confess to get it over with."

A beat of silence, then Isabella added, her voice a low hiss.

"Frankly, it might be better if Olivia doesn't... fully recover, not if she got a good look at Marcus' s face."

My stomach twisted into a knot of pure acid.

"He owes Marcus this," Isabella continued, her voice rising slightly, a strange, brittle edge to it. "If Ethan hadn't spiked my drink at that Sundance party all those years ago, forcing me into this marriage, this life, separating me from Marcus, none of this would have happened! He ruined my life, my chances with Marcus."

She mentioned leaking my film treatments to Marcus for years, sabotaging my career from the inside.

I felt something cold and hard in my pocket, a small, heavy object.

The lensatic compass I' d given her when we were first dating, engraved with "Our True North."

She' d said she kept it on her desk. A lie, like everything else.

My fingers closed around it, the metal biting into my palm.

With a sudden, desperate strength, I crushed it, the glass cracking, the casing deforming in my grip.

The sharp edges dug into my skin, but I barely felt it.

The pain was nothing compared to the inferno of betrayal raging inside me.