---- Chapter 15 Julian Gallegos POV: The photo was burned into my mind. The woman in the background of the news report. It was her. It had to be her. Hope, a feeling | thought had died with her, was a violent, desperate thing clawing its way up my throat. | hired the best private investigators money could buy. | gave them one mission: find out if Khloe Rojas is alive. The days | waited for their report were a special kind of hell. | was a prisoner in my own gilded cage, haunted by the ghost of my wife. | couldn't sleep. When | did, my dreams were filled with her screams, her broken body, her dead eyes in that morgue photo. | re-read her old diaries, which I' d found in a hidden box in her closet, torturing myself with her words of love, her pain, her descent into despair. Every page was a testament to my monstrousness. "He doesn't remember me," she' d written after the hospital. "The man | love looked at me today as if | were a stranger. Worse than a stranger. An enemy. | don' t know how to live in a world where he doesn't love me." Another entry, weeks later, after Leo' s death. "The love is gone. It died with my brother. All that' s left is this cold, hard ---- thing in my chest. | don' t recognize myself anymore. He turned me into this. A creature of hate." Then, finally, the report came. The investigator sat across from me, his face grim. "She's alive," he said. The world stopped spinning. Alive. The most beautiful word in the English language. A reprieve. A second chance. "The body that washed ashore was a misidentification," the investigator continued, laying out photos on the table. "Rojas was smart. She faked her death perfectly. New identity, offshore accounts, the works. She calls herself Dr. Aris Thorne now. She's working for a humanitarian aid organization in Al- Tharbia." He pushed a recent photo across the table. It was her. Thinner, her face etched with a weariness | had never seen before, but it was unmistakably her. She was smiling, a small, tired smile, as she handed a piece of candy to a dirty-faced child. The investigator cleared his throat. "We also recovered some items from your penthouse. From her private rooms, which were... badly damaged." He slid another set of photos over. Photos of my destruction. Her slashed clothes. Her smashed models. The torn picture of her family. And then, the last photo. A close-up of the floor of the water cellar, taken after she had been released. There ---- were dark, reddish-brown stains on the concrete. Blood. Her blood, from where her fingernails had been scraped raw trying to claw her way out. A guttural sob escaped my lips. | saw it all with horrifying clarity. The terror she must have felt, locked in the dark, hurt and alone. The despair of finding her life's work destroyed. The agony of seeing her last family photo torn in two. "She didn't just leave me," | choked out, my voice thick with self-loathing. "| drove her away. | hunted her." | had to get to her. | had to beg her for forgiveness. | had to make her understand that the man who did those things wasn't me. "Book me a flight to Al-Tharbia," | ordered Mark. "Now." "Sir, it's a war zone," he protested. "And you're an international fugitive." "| don't care," | snarled. "Get it done." Before | left, there was one last piece of business. | walked to the room where | had been keeping Helena. She looked up at me, her eyes filled with a desperate hope that | was about to forgive her. "Jules," she whispered. "Khloe's alive," | said, my voice flat. The color drained from her face. ---- "You took her voice, Helena," | said, advancing on her slowly. "You used her voice, wore her robes, tried to take her life. It seems only fair that you give it back." Her screams were muffled by the soundproofed walls of the operating room | had set up in the villa. | made the surgeon remove her vocal cords. Not for a transplant. For nothing. | just wanted them gone. | left her on a street corner in the nearest town, voiceless and penniless, with nothing but the clothes on her back. A small, pathetic fraction of the pain she had helped me inflict on Khloe. It wasn't justice. It was just a start. The real penance would be earning back my wife's love. | would spend the rest of my life doing it if | had to.