---- Chapter 14 Chapter 14 Kyle Lopez POV: Seeing her with him... it was a new kind of hell. It wasn't just that she had replaced me. It was that she had upgraded. Anderson Hernandez was everything | had pretended to be: confident without being arrogant, powerful without being cruel. He was a better man. And he deserved her. The realization was a bitter pill to swallow. My pathetic hope that my suffering would somehow earn her forgiveness evaporated, replaced by a bleak, resigned despair. She wasn't punishing me to test me. She was punishing me because she enjoyed it. And then, she would discard me. The thought of a life without even the faintest connection to her, without even her hatred to sustain me, was a terrifying void. That night, as | cleaned her office, | found something that had fallen behind her desk. It was a small, leather-bound book. Her journal. | knew | shouldn't. It was a violation of what little trust remained between us, even the trust between an employer and her most reviled employee. But | was a desperate man, starving for any insight into the mind of the woman who now held my entire world in her hands. ---- | opened it. Her elegant, precise handwriting filled the pages. He accepted the janitor position. The fool. Does he really think this pathetic display of masochism will move me? It's contemptible. The words were a slap in the face. | kept reading. Anderson is a good man. Too good for me. He sees a queen, not the monster I'm becoming. | am hollowing myself out with this vengeance, and for what? The satisfaction is fleeting. It leaves me colder than before. My heart ached. Not for myself, but for her. This revenge, this crusade to destroy me, was destroying her, too. | had not only broken her heart; | had poisoned her soul. | turned to the last entry, dated that evening. | saw the look on his face tonight when Anderson kissed me. For a moment, it felt like victory. But now, in the quiet of my own home, it just feels... ugly. | have become him. | am using a good man to torture a broken one. | have built a new empire, but | am the only person living in it. And it is a cold, lonely place. | closed the journal, my hands trembling. This wasn't about winning her back anymore. It was about saving her from me. From the monster | had created. ---- | had to set her free. | placed the journal back on her desk, in plain sight. Then | went to the human resources office. | found a resignation form, filled it out, and left it on the supervisor's desk. | walked out of the building, not through the service entrance, but through the main lobby. | didn't look back. | had one last thing to do. One final act of penance. And then, | would disappear from her life forever.