Chapter 2

Claire' s POV:

That night, sleep was a stranger. I lay perfectly still, feigning slumber while Gabriel' s arm lay heavy across my waist, a possessive, thoughtless weight. He was breathing deeply, lost in a dream world where his deceptions were secure. A world where I was still his compliant, oblivious wife.

His love was a performance, and I was the unwilling audience of one. Every gentle touch, every whispered endearment, wasn't for me. It was for her. For Aria. It was all a carefully constructed stage play to keep his hit-making machine happy and productive.

Waiting until his breathing settled into a steady, deep rhythm, I began the painstaking process of escape. I lifted his arm, millimeter by millimeter, my muscles screaming with the strain of the slow, deliberate movement. When it was finally free, I held my breath, listening. He didn't stir.

I slipped out of bed, my bare feet silent on the cold marble floor. The moonlight streaming through the floor-to-ceiling windows cast long, distorted shadows across the room, turning familiar objects into monstrous shapes. My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic drumbeat in the oppressive quiet.

As I tiptoed past the armchair where he' d draped his jacket, my hip brushed against it. A small, metallic object clattered to the floor. The sound was deafening in the silence. I froze, my blood turning to ice. I looked back at the bed, expecting to see him sitting up, his eyes narrowed in suspicion.

But he remained asleep, lost to the world.

Letting out a shaky breath, I bent down, my fingers fumbling in the dark to find what I' d knocked over. It was his lighter. A silver Zippo, heavy and cool in my palm. It was a gift from me, for our first anniversary. Or so I had thought.

Something felt different about it. I ran my thumb over the smooth surface. There was an engraving on the side, one I didn't recognize. I angled it toward the moonlight, my eyes straining to make out the delicate script.

It wasn' t the simple "G" I had commissioned.

Instead, two letters were intertwined in an elegant, flowing script.

G & A.

Gabriel and Aria.

The air left my lungs in a rush, as if I' d been punched in the gut. For months, I had been gathering evidence, piecing together the fragments of their betrayal-overheard calls, suspicious receipts, the lingering scent of her perfume on his clothes. I knew, logically, what they were doing. I knew the marriage was a transaction.

But this... this was different. This was a desecration. He had taken a symbol of my love, of our supposed beginning, and had overwritten it with the truth of his affair. He had carried their love in his pocket every single day, right next to his heart, while I lived in a carefully constructed lie.

Any lingering, microscopic sliver of doubt I might have harbored, any pathetic, desperate hope that I had misinterpreted everything, vanished in that instant. The love I had held for him, a love that had defined my entire adult life, didn't just die. It putrefied. It turned into something ugly and cold and hard in the center of my chest.

I was a fool. A pawn in a game I didn't even know I was playing. My husband didn' t just not love me; he held me in contempt. He and my sister, the two people I loved most in the world, had conspired to steal my life, my talent, my heart, and they had done it with smiling faces and empty promises.

The lighter felt like it was burning my skin. It was the final piece of evidence, the last nail in the coffin of my old life. There was no going back. There was no room for forgiveness. There was nothing left but the cold, clear certainty of what I had to do next.

My gaze, once filled with adoration for the man in my bed, became a flat, empty void. The woman who had loved Gabriel Holmes was gone. In her place was someone else, a stranger forged in the fires of betrayal.

And she was ready to watch him burn.