---- Chapter 18 18 A few days later, at a private club Liam sometimes frequented in his darker moods, a woman accidentally" bumped into him. She had Maya's dark hair, Maya's intelligent eyes, even a similar way of holding her head. A carefully crafted illusion. For a fleeting, heart-stopping moment, Liam thought it was her. "Maya?" he whispered, reaching out. The woman smiled, a practiced, seductive smile. "Hello, Liam." Then reality crashed down. It wasn't Maya. The eyes were harder, the smile predatory. A cheap imitation. An insult. His brief hope curdled into violent rage. "You're not her!" he snarled, pushing her away so forcefully she stumbled. "You'll never be her!" He stormed out, leaving a stunned woman and a smirking Marc Chen, who had been watching from the shadows. This was not going to be easy. Liam returned to his office, the encounter fueling his disgust. He called an emergency meeting with Marc and the other "friends" who had been part of his enabling circle. "You're all fired," he announced, his voice cold and decisive. ---- "From Goldstein Global. From my life. Your shares will be bought out at market value. Your access, revoked." They stared at him, aghast. "Liam, you can't be serious!" Marc sputtered. "You poisoned my life," Liam said, his gaze sweeping over their shocked faces. "You encouraged my worst instincts. You normalized betrayal. You are as much to blame for Maya's departure as | am." He wouldn't absolve himself, but he would no longer tolerate their corrupting influence. "Security will escort you from the building. Don't ever contact me again." He turned his back on them, a final, definitive severance. His former friends left, a mixture of fear and impotent rage in their eyes. They had underestimated his ruthlessness, his singular focus now that Maya was gone. They had thought his grief made him weak. They were wrong. It had forged him into something harder, more dangerous. Liam walked through the silent, empty penthouse. He tried to arrange things as Maya had liked them. A futile, painful exercise. He stood by the window where she had last watched him leave with Ava. He could almost see her there, her face pale, her eyes knowing. The realization of her final, silent observation of his betrayal ---- was a fresh torment. "She saw me," he whispered. "She saw me choose." His private investigators reported back daily. Nothing. No trace of Maya Evans. Her new identity was flawless. Her disappearance, complete. "She's a ghost, sir," his head of security said, his voice grim. Liam knew the legalities. If Maya didn't surface, the divorce would eventually be granted by default He clung to the unsigned papers in his safe, a desperate, symbolic act of defiance against a fate he himself had sealed. The only link he had left to the woman who was his world.