Chapter 3

Marisol

How lavish would your party be if you illegally mined a forbidden deep sea trench, stole billions of dollars worth in minerals and precious stones and managed to get rid of your ‘deadbeat’ wife?

Well, Voss Maritime & Energy was throwing itself a party, and my husband thought, go big or go home. Too bad. I was about to crash it.

The guards stationed at the entrance asked for my invitation. I let them ask twice, out of some petty little courtesy I didn't owe them, and then I let the sea in my blood answer for me. They dropped where they stood, boneless and dreaming, and I stepped over them in my heels, satisfaction curling at my bones.

The dress I wore had been made for exactly this. Sea blue, slit clean up my thigh, pearls and diamonds swirling around my hips like they were still remembering how to move through water.

Every step I took, it caught the light and threw it back tenfold, causing everyone I walked past fixated on me like I was an ethereal beauty.

I was the Mermaid princess of Thalassor anyway. The word, ‘ethereal’ wasn’t qualified to describe me. I had washed myself down to be Julian’s perfect wife. But, he had killed that version of me a week ago.

I made sure my head stayed high the entire walk in. I hadn't held my chin like this in six years. It felt like coming home a second time.

I found them immediately. Of course I did. Julian's hands were wrapped around Celeste's waist like she was something precious he'd finally been allowed to unwrap in public, her body tucked against his, both of them glowing under the same lights his father's company had built its empire on.

No one here questioned it. No one here had ever laid eyes on his real wife, because Julian had spent six years explaining to me, so gently, so convincingly, that the business world was cutthroat and cruel and he refused to let it touch me. I was his weakness, he'd said. His softest place. Worth hiding.

I finally understood. He hadn't been protecting me from the world. He'd been casting me away so there'd be no evidence to publicly claim him.

"I'm so sorry to interrupt," I called out, and my voice carried clean across the ballroom floor, silencing three separate conversations at once. "I don't mean to bother anyone. I'm just looking for my husband."

Every other head that hadn’t noticed me in the room turned. I felt their eyes drag over the dress, over the skin the slit gave up with every step, and I let them look. Let the whispers start chewing themselves into a frenzy — who is she, whose wife, who let her in — because within thirty seconds every single one of them would know exactly who I was.

I never thought I could see my husband’s face so pale. The blood was drained clean out of it.

Celeste's followed a half second behind, her painted smile cracking down the middle like the seal I'd broken open a week ago.

How did she survive?

I could read the question sitting behind both their eyes as clearly as if they'd screamed it. I smiled instead, soft and sweet, the exact smile I used to give Julian across the breakfast table every morning for six straight years, and walked toward them like I hadn't a single reason in the world to hate either of them.

"Julian." I reached up and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear, unhurried, deliberate. "You really didn't need to bring a mistress to the party. You already have a wife."

The word wife landed like a struck match in a room full of gas.

Phones lifted. Whispers turned to open murmuring. And Julian, cornered in front of the very people whose respect he'd spent his whole life clawing for, did the only thing a coward knows how to do.

He hit me.

The crack of his palm against my cheek echoed clean off the marble, and for one breath the entire ballroom went silent enough to hear the ice clink in someone's glass across the room.

"Apologize to her." His voice shook with something he was desperate to pass off as righteous fury. "Right now. You've embarrassed me, you've embarrassed Celeste, you psychotic little stalker—"

I laughed.

I laughed loud and open, my cheek still stinging, and the sound of it seemed to unsettle him more than anything I could have said. "A stalker? That's rich, Julian. Truly. Because three years ago, when Celeste first walked through your doors, you complained to me nightly about how relentlessly that woman pestered you." I turned, slow, deliberate, and let my gaze land on her like a blade. "And now, three years later, she's your mistress. Funny how pests climb, isn't it?"

The gasp that rolled through the crowd was audible, physical, like the room itself had flinched.

"So Celeste Marlowe slept her way to VP."

"No wonder she made it to Communications in three years flat—"

"That's disgusting. That poor woman."

"Shut your fucking mouth." Celeste's voice cracked, her cheeks flaming red, all her careful poise gone in an instant. "Don't you dare spread rumors about me."

"Guards!" Julian's arm shot out, shielding her, his whole body angled toward her and away from me like I was something diseased. "Get this filthy woman out of my building!"

Two hands seized my arms, dragging me back, and still I couldn't stop smiling, because disgust doesn't begin to describe what I felt looking at him. Six years. Six years of my life, my kingdom, my mother's blessing that I'd thrown away for a man who was currently ordering security to remove me like garbage from his party.

How had I ever loved this idiot enough to give up an empire for him?

"I gave explicit instructions." Julian's voice cracked with fury now, aimed at his own men instead of me. "This event was invitation only! How the hell did she get in here?"

A third guard came sprinting up, breathless, and bowed so low his nose nearly touched the floor. "Sir — the men stationed at the front entrance were all found unconscious. All twelve of them."

The room went quiet again, differently this time. Uneasy.

"Twelve men," someone whispered near the back, loud enough to carry. "She dropped twelve trained guards and didn't even break a sweat. Look at her. Her hair isn't even out of place."

I let my eyes settle on Julian one last time, calm now, terrifyingly calm, the way the sea goes still right before it swallows a ship whole.

"Should I keep going?" I asked him, sweet as poison. "Or would you rather I tell them what you did the moment after you caught me watching you fuck her in your own office?"