Chapter 160: Liam Snaps! [FIXED!]
Liam’s eyes snapped fully open, and for a moment his brain refused to process what he was seeing. Sara. Standing there, in his apartment, close enough to touch.
Before conscious thought caught up with instinct, he was already moving — off the couch, hand closing around her throat, driving her back against the wall with a force that surprised even him.
"What the fuck are you doing here, you stupid bitch!"
His own voice sounded foreign to him, raw with an anger he hadn’t fully accessed before, not even in the worst of everything that had happened between them. Sara didn’t fight it. Didn’t scream, didn’t claw at his hand. She simply stared back at him, composed even as her breathing grew ragged, saliva slipping from the corner of her mouth as his grip tightened.
Something in her expression — steady, almost amused — cut through the haze fast enough for him to catch himself.
He let go.
She dropped, catching herself on her knees, breathing hard, and something in the way she looked up at him afterward unsettled him more than the violence itself had. She didn’t look afraid. If anything, there was something close to satisfaction sitting behind her eyes.
"C’mon now, Liam," she said, voice rough but steady. "Don’t tell me you hate me."
He stood there, fists clenched, forcing down an urge he’d never once felt in his life — the actual desire to hurt someone physically, sustained and deliberate. It scared him a little, how close to the surface it had come.
Sara rose slowly, smoothing down the hem of her outfit, deliberately skimpy, calculated the way everything about her always was.
"Aww," she said, tilting her head. "You do hate me, Lammy."
"Don’t call me that."
"You used to love it."
"I don’t now."
She shrugged, unbothered, and gestured casually toward the corner of the room. Liam followed her gaze and found her phone propped against a shelf, screen angled directly at them, recording light still active.
His stomach dropped.
"You just choked me, Liam," Sara said, almost gently. "On camera. And you gave me this key yourself, remember? So there’s no break-in story here. Just you, alone with your ex, putting your hands around her throat."
Liam’s jaw tightened. He knew, logically, she likely had no real intention of using it — this wasn’t really about the footage itself, it was about reminding him what she still held over him. But the damage such a clip could do, regardless of context, regardless of what actually happened before it, was catastrophic. He knew exactly how these things played out publicly. Guilty in the court of public opinion before any actual truth got a chance to surface.
He forced his breathing to slow, forced the rage back down beneath something colder, more controlled.
"What do you want, Sara? I don’t have time for these games."
"I came to see how you were doing." She smiled, soft and utterly unconvincing. "I missed you."
"Bullshit."
"Maybe." She didn’t bother arguing the point further, already knowing he saw right through it. Instead she stepped closer, closing most of the distance between them. "I left you something. In your bedroom."
"What is it?"
She pressed a finger to her lips. "You’ll know when you see it, Lammy."
And then she was moving past him, unhurried, heading straight for the door like the entire confrontation moments earlier hadn’t happened at all.
Liam stood frozen for a moment after she left, adrenaline still burning through his system, several questions catching in his throat that he never got the chance to ask — how she’d gotten in, whether she still had a key, why he hadn’t already changed the locks after everything.
He’d deal with that later.
He made his way to the bedroom, and there, sitting squarely on the center of the bed, was a folder.
He stared at it for a long moment before picking it up, some instinct warning him this wasn’t going to be simple. There was something deliberate about the way it had been placed, methodical in a way that didn’t match Sara’s usual chaos.
He tore it open.
Photos. Documents. Financial records, timestamps, correspondence — all of it centered on one name printed clearly across the top page.
Arthur.
Scrawled across the bottom in Sara’s handwriting, three words sat underlined twice.
Go for his throat.
Liam stood there, staring down at the contents scattered across his hands, mind racing through every possible explanation and landing on none that made sense.
How the hell did Sara know who Arthur even was?
-
Sara stepped out of the building and into the cool night air, fingers trailing slowly along the curve of her throat where Liam’s grip had left the faintest trace of pressure behind. Not quite pain. Something closer to a lingering awareness, a reminder of exactly how much that moment had rattled something loose in her.
This version of Liam was interesting.
She hadn’t expected that particular reaction from him — the sheer speed of it, the raw, unfiltered anger that had surfaced the instant he’d registered her presence. The Liam she remembered had never once shown her anything close to that. Controlled, composed, occasionally cold when pushed, but never violent. Never like this.
She’d gone against everything Arthur had instructed her to do, and she knew it. Sara had ignored most of that the second she found herself standing in Liam’s bedroom, patience winning out over instruction because she’d wanted, more than anything, to actually see him. See what he’d become since everything fell apart.
She had been building a case against Arthur for quite sometime because why not? Even she needed leverage against somoene that influencial.
She climbed into her car and sat there for a moment before pulling out her phone, scrolling back to the footage still sitting in her camera roll.
She pressed play.
The clip ran short, barely fifteen seconds, but she watched it twice through, then a third time, biting down softly on her lower lip as she studied Liam’s expression in the recording — the fury there, raw and unguarded, nothing like the careful, calculated man she remembered dating.
A slow smile spread across her face.
She didn’t fully know, watching it loop again, whether Arthur’s version of this plan would actually win out in the end. He was brilliant, methodical, rarely wrong about these kinds of calculations. But rooting purely for the predictable outcome had never much interested her.
She wanted to see which man actually came out on top.
"When did you become so violent, Lammy?" she murmured to the screen, still smiling, before locking her phone and pulling out into the night.