Chapter 142: Revenge?
The apartment had gone quiet. Darren was out cold on the pull-out couch, one arm hanging off the edge, and Mateo had crashed not long after in the guest room, the new action figure still sitting on the nightstand where he’d carefully placed it before turning off the light.
Liam lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, sleep refusing to come no matter how tired his body actually was.
He hated that it was her. Hated that after everything — after the humiliation, after watching his entire professional life collapse in real time — a single unread message from Sara was enough to keep his mind circling long after everyone else in the apartment had gone still.
He’d dismissed it earlier without much thought, deleting the thread on instinct, telling himself it meant nothing. And in the moment, it hadn’t. But moments passed, and now, lying here in the dark with nothing else demanding his attention, the question crept back in uninvited.
Why now? Why reach out at all, after this much silence, after everything she’d already taken from him?
It wasn’t that he wanted her back. That part, at least, he could say with total certainty. Whatever had existed between them before, whoever else had occupied that same space since — and he had no illusions there’d been others — had closed that door permanently. He had no interest in revisiting that particular version of intimacy, not after knowing what he now knew.
But there was something else sitting underneath the indifference, something sharper. A part of him — quiet, but persistent — wanted her to regret it. Wanted her to understand, eventually, exactly what she’d cost him. Because the humiliation had been real. Gut-deep, disorienting, the kind of collapse most people didn’t recover from cleanly. If it weren’t for the rebate system, none of this — the hotel, the resources, the slow rebuild of everything he’d lost — would exist right now. He’d likely be unemployed. Barred from practicing, his reputation gutted beyond salvage, scraping by on whatever minimum-wage work would even take him, assuming he’d recovered mentally enough to hold a job at all.
That was the honest version of the alternate timeline. Not a dramatic exaggeration — just the plain, unforgiving truth of what her actions had actually set in motion.
And yet.
There was another version of that same night he sometimes let himself wander into, briefly, before shutting it down. The version where none of it happened. Where things simply worked, where whatever they’d built together had actually meant what it was supposed to mean.
Because he had loved her. That part refused to fully disappear no matter how much damage came after it. Love didn’t erase itself just because the person attached to it turned out to be someone else entirely underneath.
He wasn’t sure, lying there in the dark, whether what he felt toward her now was hate or something more complicated, something that hadn’t fully separated itself from what came before it.
The two had always shared the same room in a person’s chest. He just hadn’t expected, this many months later, to still be standing in the doorway between them.
-
Vanessa sat at her desk long after everyone else had left the office, scrolling slowly through the document Liam had sent her since that day. It was thorough — more thorough than she expected, honestly, broken down section by section in a way that read less like a formal proposal and more like someone had deliberately simplified it, anticipating that she might not follow the denser legal or financial language on the first pass.
She noticed that immediately, and something about it landed differently than she expected.
Most people who operated at his level didn’t bother translating anything down for anyone. They assumed you kept up or you got left behind, and Vanessa had encountered plenty of that particular arrogance throughout her career already. Liam hadn’t done that. He’d taken the time to actually make sure she understood it, structuring the terminology in a way that respected her intelligence without assuming a background she didn’t have.
That, more than anything in the document itself, impressed her.
She kept reading, working through the projections, the structure, the outline of what he was actually trying to build. It became clear fairly quickly that this wasn’t some vague, half-formed fantasy dressed up in confident language. There was an actual plan here — sequenced, deliberate, accounting for contingencies she wouldn’t have thought to ask about herself.
But the plan, as impressive as it was, wasn’t really the part that stopped her cold.
It was the number.
Not one million. Not even close. What he was outlining required capital in the multiple millions, a scale that made her sit back in her chair and reread the section twice just to make sure she wasn’t misinterpreting the figures. There was no version of Liam she knew — recently fired, recently humiliated, driving around in a car that, while decent, wasn’t exactly indicative of hidden wealth — that squared with someone quietly sitting on five-plus million dollars in liquid capital.
And yet the plan assumed access to exactly that.
She sat with the contradiction for a while, turning it over, slowly arriving at a conclusion that unsettled her more than the actual dollar figure did: whatever else Liam was — awkward online, oddly quiet about half his life, socially clumsy in ways that didn’t match how sharp he clearly was on paper — he was, underneath all of it, genuinely brilliant.
That realization sat uncomfortably close to something else she’d been avoiding looking at too directly.
Because if this had just been a crush — simple, surface-level interest — hearing that he might be talking to another woman wouldn’t have done what it did to her chest earlier. She wouldn’t have spent an hour combing through his following list for a name that barely mattered. She wouldn’t currently be sitting here well past work hours, reading his business proposal like it was something precious instead of just professional correspondence.
She let out a short, humorless laugh at herself, shaking her head at the mess she’d apparently walked herself into without fully noticing.
But there was still the matter of the money. Whatever she felt personally, professionally this project represented something real — a genuine opportunity, the kind that could reshape her entire trajectory if it actually worked. Getting in early on something built by a mind like his wasn’t nothing. It could change her life just as much as it stood to change his.
The problem was the collision course it sat on.
If Liam actually moved forward with something at this scale, it would put him in direct, unavoidable opposition to the very firm she currently worked for. And that meant Richard.
Vanessa knew enough about Richard, even from her position several rungs below where the real decisions got made, to understand exactly what that implied. Richard didn’t simply compete with rivals.
He dismantled them, methodically, thoroughly, in ways that rarely left room for a second attempt.
That reputation hadn’t been built on rumor. It had been earned, repeatedly, by people who thought they could carve out space against him and discovered too late how narrow that space actually was.
If Liam became a real competitor, visible enough to register on Richard’s radar, there was no guarantee — none at all — that he’d survive the response.
Vanessa closed the document slowly, staring at her screen, the excitement from a few minutes ago tempered now by something heavier settling in its place.
-
Marcus didn’t stay long. He’d only come to hand Rachel the document himself, something he could have easily routed through his lawyers instead — cleaner, more efficient, entirely impersonal. But efficiency hadn’t been the point. He’d wanted to see her reaction firsthand, to gauge whatever state she was currently in, and there was a quiet satisfaction in his expression that suggested he’d found exactly what he came looking for.
Their conversation stayed brief and clipped, neither of them offering much beyond what the moment strictly required. Rachel took the folder from him without much comment, and Marcus lingered only long enough to make one or two pointed remarks before turning to leave.
Whatever affection had once existed between them had long since curdled into something closer to contempt on his end, though it wasn’t her looks that had driven that shift. She’d never stopped being attractive to him, if anything. It was everything underneath the surface that had turned him cold — the parts of her he’d only fully understood once it was already too late to walk away cleanly. He’d come to believe, over time, that she’d worn a version of herself specifically designed to secure a piece of what he’d built, a mask constructed carefully enough to survive scrutiny until the marriage was already locked in. And he wasn’t a poor man. Far from it. Which made the calculation, in his mind, obvious in hindsight.
He didn’t say any of that outright today. He didn’t need to. The document did the talking now, and within minutes of arriving, he was already heading back toward his car, leaving Rachel standing in her doorway with the folder in hand and the door swinging shut behind him.
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A/N: You lot a bit greedy with those powerstones/gift😒