---- Chapter 8 Ivy Farley POV: Holden moved like a phantom. One moment he was holding a wounded Kaela, the next his hand was on me, a brutal, open -palmed strike against the side of my head. My ears rang, the world tilting in a dizzying flash of white. The gun flew from my grasp, skittering across the marble floor. | stumbled back, catching myself against the wall, my head throbbing with a dull, echoing pain. He didn't press the attack. His attention was already back on Kaela, his touch infinitely gentle as he examined her shoulder. He cradled her face in his hands, murmuring soft, soothing words, his voice thick with a tenderness that felt like a physical assault against my already broken heart. She was crying, her teeth sinking into his other shoulder to stifle her sobs, and he let her, his expression one of profound pity and pain. He looked at her the way a man looks at the most precious, fragile thing in his world. A thing he had to protect at all costs, even from me. Then he looked up, his gaze meeting mine over her head. The softness was gone. His eyes were cold, empty. Dead. "| want a divorce," he said, the words falling from his lips like ---- chips of ice. | stared at him, speechless. This was what | had been fighting for, screaming for. But hearing it from him, under these circumstances, felt like a death sentence. "My lawyer will have the papers sent to the penthouse in the morning. Sign them," he commanded. "Take whatever you want. Half the assets, the properties on the coast, | don't care. Just sign them and get out of my life." He turned his back on me then, a final, dismissive gesture. He lifted Kaela into his arms and carried her back into the room, his men closing the door behind him with a definitive click. | was escorted from the hospital by his guards, not as their queen, but as a trespasser. The silent, humiliating journey back to the empty penthouse was the longest of my life. | was numb, a hollowed-out shell of the woman | had been just days before. The next morning, two envelopes arrived. One was a thick legal document. The divorce papers, signed with Holden' s neat, decisive signature. The other was a heavy, cream- colored card. An invitation. A wedding invitation. Holden Trevino and Kaela Espinoza requested the honor of my presence at their marriage ceremony. It was in three days. The invitation was scented with her cheap floral perfume, a ---- final, petty act of defiance. The white of the divorce papers and the cream of the invitation sat side-by-side on my table, a cruel tableau of my life's end and her life's beginning. Everything | had begged and fought for, he had given me in an instant, only to throw his new life in my face. Tucked inside the invitation was another handwritten note from Kaela. | hope you can make it. | want you to watch as Holden makes me his wife. You' Il be out of the penthouse by then, of course. He' s giving it to me as a wedding gift. By the way, Holden sent a surprise for you. He said you'd want to hear it. Attached to the note was a small, unmarked USB drive. My pride told me to smash it, to burn it along with the invitation. But she had used the one word she knew | couldn't resist: surprise. Holden was a strategist. His surprises were never simple. | plugged the drive into my laptop. It was an audio file. | clicked play. It was them. In bed. Her soft sighs, his low murmurs. | almost shut it off, but then her voice cut through the haze, clear and questioning. "Holden... why me?" she asked. "Why do you want a baby with me so badly? You could have any woman in the world." Holden's voice, when it came, was a low, conspiratorial ---- whisper, laced with a venom | had never heard from him before. It wasn't the voice of my husband. It was the voice of a monster. "Because you're clean," he said. "You're pure. Not like her. Ivy... she's tainted. After what Geraldo Jones's men did to her... after they..." he trailed off, the implication hanging heavy and poisonous in the air. "She' s dirty. She could never give me a pure heir. The thought of having a child from her body... it makes my skin crawl. That's why | made sure she could never get pregnant again. Our son, our legacy, has to be perfect. It has to come from you." 2 The laptop slipped from my hands, crashing to the floor. The room was silent, but the sound of Holden' s voice echoed in my head, a demonic chant of betrayal. He thought | had been... assaulted during the attack. He saw me as "tainted." Dirty. And he had been secretly sabotaging my fertility for years. The man | loved hadn't just betrayed me with another woman. He had betrayed my body, my trust, my very soul. He had looked at my deepest trauma and, instead of helping me heal, had used it as a justification to cast me aside like something unclean.