Chapter 4 On His Knees
Veyra returned to the rental apartment. An hour later, Caspian burst through the door, still wearing that designer suit worth more than most people’s rent.
"Veyra-"
“Shut up! You made me live like a fool." she said.
"I didn’t want to lose you."
The words came out of him like a confession. She stared at him. He said I didn’t want to lose you like it was an apology.
You didn’t want to lose me, she thought. You didn’t want to lose a woman who never checked the accounts, never fought back, swallowed every lie you fed her and called it truth.
"If I hadn’t followed you," she said, "were you planning to hide this forever?"
"I..."
"Caspian." Her voice was ice. "You made me count coins. You made me work double shifts. You let me think we were building something together while you were buying that woman diamond rings, Prada necklaces.”
"No, that’s not—" He shook his head desperately.
She turned and started throwing clothes into a bag.
"Veyra, where are you going?"
"Where do you think? You have someone else. Why would I stay?"
"Don’t!" He grabbed her wrist, grip bruising. "I can explain. Please don’t leave. I’m begging you—"
Crack.
She wrenched free and slapped his cheek.
"You killed my mother." Each word was a blade. "And you have the nerve to ask me to stay?"
His fists trembled at his sides. She kept packing.
Thud. He dropped to his knees.
"I know I’m a bastard. But I was scared." His voice broke as he looked up, eyes bloodshot. "I was terrified you’d leave me. By then I’d already made mistakes—with her. I knew I couldn’t hide it forever, that you’d find out eventually. But if your mother died, you’d have no one left but me. Even if you discovered the truth, you’d never be able to leave."
Veyra’s fists trembled violently.
"Caspian, what are you even saying?!"
"I’m not lying to you." He looked at her with desperate sincerity. "Your mother was already terminally ill. Even if that five hundred thousand had saved her, she would have spent the rest of her life without dignity. Maybe death was the kindest release. She used to say things like that herself. I just—"
Slap.
Another vicious blow. Veyra struck his face through her tears, sobbing.
"That was my mother! Who gave you the right to decide whether she lived or died? What if it had been Xiomara’s mother who was sick? Would you have let her die too?!"
Anguish twisted Caspian’s features.
"Get away from me."
Her teeth ground together. Caspian stayed on his knees. "I can’t."
She shoved past him toward the door. His arms locked around her like a vice. "Veyra, if you walk out that door, I’ll throw myself out this window. Right now."
"Fine." Her eyes burned red. "Then go ahead and die."
Caspian stared at her. He rose. He actually turned and opened the window.
"Stop!"
The word tore from her throat before she could stop it. He froze, half his body already leaning into the void. He turned back, his gaze stripped raw with desperation.
She closed her eyes.
"Get up," she said.
Behind her, she heard him scramble to his feet. He was still crying. She could hear it in his breathing.
"I’m not staying because I forgive you," she said. She turned around. His face was a mess. Tears, snot, blood from his lip. He looked like a child who had broken something expensive and didn’t understand why he couldn’t glue it back together.
"Anything," he said. "Anything just name it."
She made him sit at the kitchen table.
The same table where they had eaten a thousand meals. Cereal for dinner when money was tight. Takeout from the place that always forgot her sauce. Birthday cake the first year, and then no birthday cake after that because he was always working.
She stood across from him with her arms crossed.
"You’re going to sign a postnuptial agreement," she said. "Right now. Tonight."
He nodded. Too fast and too eager. Like he thought agreeing quickly would make this better.
"If you cheat again—"
"I won’t. I swear to God, Veyra, I will never even look at another woman—"
"If you cheat again," she said, speaking over him, "we divorce immediately. No counseling. No second chances. And you pay me five billion dollars in compensation."
He blinked. "Five billion—"
"That’s the number." She had pulled it out of the air. She had no idea if he had five billion dollars. But she had seen the diamond. She had heard Xiomara talk about the villa. She knew he had more than he had ever let her see. "You sign, or I walk out that door and I call every reporter in the city and I play them the recording of your mistress laughing about my mother’s death. Your choice."
His face went white. "You wouldn’t."
"Try me."
He signed.
She watched his hand shake as he held the pen. She had typed up the agreement on her phone and sent it to a twenty-four-hour print shop near the apartment. The delivery took forty minutes. She made him wait in silence. He tried to talk twice. She held up her hand both times.
When the documents arrived, he signed every page without reading them.
Then he swore on everything he owned that he would cut off all contact with Xiomara. He transferred control of all his assets to her. He promised to repay every cent he had ever spent on Xiomara a thousandfold.
She didn’t believe him.
But she took the documents anyway.
She didn’t go straight back to room after that. She opened the notes app on her phone and wrote down every detail he’d let slip that night — the name of the corporate account, the last four digits of an offshore number he’d mentioned, the exact moment he’d said I always had it. She didn’t know yet what she’d do with any of it.
He moved her into the mansion the next day.
The mansion. She still couldn’t think of it any other way. It was not just a house but a monument to money she had never seen, a physical manifestation of every lie he had ever told her.
Marble floors. Chandeliers. A kitchen bigger than their entire apartment. A bedroom with a balcony that overlooked a garden she had not known existed until she saw it from the window.
She walked through the rooms with her arms wrapped around herself, touching nothing, feeling like a ghost haunting someone else’s life.
Caspian followed her like a dog. He asked if she wanted coffee. If she wanted lunch. If she wanted him to draw her a bath. He said her name constantly, like he was afraid she would forget who he was if he stopped saying it.
She did not answer most of the time.
She slept in the guest room. He did not argue. He left a glass of water by her bed every night and a rose on the pillow, and every morning she moved the rose to the dresser and drank the water because she was thirsty.
He stopped coming home late. He canceled all his meetings. He sat in the living room with his laptop and worked from there, glancing up every few minutes to make sure she was still in the house.
She felt like a prisoner in a golden cage.
But she stayed. She told herself it was temporary. She stayed, not out of forgiveness, and not out of weakness. She needed enough leverage before the agreement was ever put to the test. She needed Caspian to believe she was still drowning in grief, too broken to fight back.
Letting him believe he’d won was the only strategy she could currently afford.
That night, just as she was reaching for the lamp, his phone buzzed on the coffee table. He was in the shower. The screen lit up, then dimmed.
She could have ignored it.
She walked over anyway.
No name saved. Just a number, and one line:
Missed you. Same place tonight?
She stared at it for a long moment. Then the screen went dark, and the room settled back into silence, as if nothing had happened at all.
She put the phone back exactly where it had been.
Then she went back to the guest room, lay down, and closed her eyes.
Maybe this wasn’t a coincidence. And maybe, she was already ready for it.