The outfit arrives at four in the afternoon, delivered in a black garment bag with Christopher's initials embossed in silver. I unzip it slowly, already knowing it won't be the gray uniform I've worn for weeks.

It's worse.

A black dress—if you can call it that. More like scraps of fabric held together by strategic stitching. The neckline plunges to my sternum. The back is completely open, designed to showcase skin from shoulders to tailbone. The skirt barely covers what it needs to.

I hold it up to the light from my storage room's single bulb. The fabric is expensive, silk that catches and shimmers. This isn't about poverty. It's about exposure.

My scars will show. Every single one.

I dress in the dark, my fingers fumbling with the zipper. The silk whispers against my skin, cool and unforgiving. When I catch my reflection in the small mirror Marcus left me, I see exactly what Christopher intended: a broken woman wearing her shame like jewelry.

The scars crisscross my back in raised white lines. Ramon's belt. His cigarettes. The time he used a knife to carve his initials near my spine, claiming his property. They tell a story I've never spoken aloud, written in a language of violence.

I pull my hair forward over my shoulders, but it's useless. The dress was designed to reveal, not conceal.

Upstairs, the penthouse has transformed into something from a magazine spread. Crystal chandeliers throw prismatic light across marble. Waiters in crisp white jackets arrange champagne flutes on silver trays. Holly floats through it all in emerald silk, directing traffic like a conductor.

She stops when she sees me. Her eyes travel down, then up, lingering on my exposed back. Her smile could cut glass.

"Perfect," she breathes. "You look exactly like what you are."

Christopher emerges from his study in a tuxedo that probably costs more than Ramon paid for my wedding ring. His gaze lands on me, and for one heartbeat, something flickers across his face. Then it's gone, replaced by that familiar granite.

"You'll serve champagne," he says, not quite meeting my eyes. "Keep the trays moving. Don't speak unless spoken to. And Arabella?" Now he looks at me directly. "Try not to embarrass me."

The first guests arrive at seven. Manhattan's elite, the same people who used to air-kiss my cheeks at gallery openings. Now they look through me, their gazes sliding past as if I'm part of the decor.

I lift a tray from the kitchen—crystal flutes filled with Dom Pérignon, each one worth more than my weekly food allowance. The tray is heavy. My arms shake within minutes.

I move through the crowd like a ghost, offering champagne to people who don't see me. A woman in Valentino takes a glass without acknowledgment. A man in Tom Ford grabs two, his eyes on Holly across the room.

Then I feel it. The stares.

A woman whispers to her companion, her gaze fixed on my back. Another guest turns, his expression shifting from curiosity to disgust. The conversations around me develop an edge, a sharpness.

They're looking at my scars.

Heat crawls up my neck. My vision blurs at the edges, that familiar warning sign. Not now. Please, not now.

I make it to the bar, set down the empty tray, reach for a full one. The crystal catches the light, throwing rainbows across my hands. I lift it. The weight pulls at my shoulders, my arms, my chest where my lungs are trying to remember how to function.

Three steps. That's all I manage.

The room tilts. The tray slips from my fingers in slow motion. Crystal explodes against marble, the sound like a gunshot in the sudden silence. Champagne spreads across the white carpet in a golden stain.

Every conversation stops.

I'm on my knees in the wreckage, glass cutting through the thin fabric at my shins. The cough builds in my chest like a living thing, clawing its way up my throat.

Footsteps. Christopher's shoes enter my field of vision, polished to a mirror shine.

"Get up."

I try. My legs won't cooperate. The cough erupts, violent and wet. I press my hand to my mouth, but it's not enough.

Blood sprays through my fingers. Onto the white carpet. Onto Christopher's pristine tuxedo shirt. Onto his face.

The room goes silent as a tomb.

I stare at the red on his shirt, watching it spread like a Rorschach test. My hand is still pressed to my mouth, blood seeping between my fingers, dripping onto the shattered crystal at my knees.

Christopher's face is a mask of fury and something else—something that looks almost like fear. But that can't be right.

"You bit your tongue." His voice is low, dangerous. "You staged this."

I shake my head, but the movement makes the room spin.

His hand clamps around my upper arm, yanking me to my feet. Glass cuts deeper into my knees as I rise. He drags me through the crowd, past Holly's manufactured gasp of concern, past the guests who part like the Red Sea.

The kitchen door swings shut behind us, muffling the whispers.

Christopher releases me. I stumble against the counter, my legs finally giving out. I slide down the cabinet, leaving a smear of blood on the white lacquer.

He's at the sink, scrubbing at his shirt with a dish towel. The water runs pink, then clear. His movements are sharp, violent.

"Three years," he says without turning. "Three years you lived like a queen while I built this empire from nothing. And now you pull cheap theatrical tricks for sympathy?"

I press my sleeve to my mouth. It comes away soaked.

"I didn't—" The words dissolve into another cough.

"Save it." He throws the towel into the sink. "I don't know what game you're playing, but it won't work. You made your choice. You chose money over me. Over us. And now you want me to feel sorry for you?"

He walks to the door, pauses with his hand on the handle.

"Clean yourself up. Then clean the mess you made. And Arabella?" He looks back, his eyes cold as winter. "Next time you want attention, try something more original."

The door closes.

I sit on the kitchen floor, tasting copper and champagne, listening to Holly's voice drift through the door: "She's been struggling, poor thing. Christopher's been so patient, but addiction is such a difficult battle..."

The lies spread like the bloodstain on the carpet. And I'm too tired to fight them anymore.

The doctor arrives at ten, carrying a leather bag that looks expensive and empty. He's younger than I expected, with gelled hair and a watch that catches the light when he sets his stethoscope on the coffee table.

Christopher stands by the window, arms crossed, while Holly perches on the arm of the sofa like a concerned sister. The doctor doesn't ask me to sit. I remain standing in my gray uniform—back to the standard issue after last night's humiliation—my hands clasped in front of me.

"Let's have a look." He doesn't move toward me. Just studies me from across the room, his gaze clinical and distant. "Open your mouth."

I comply. He squints, nods.

"Tongue looks fine. Any pain?"

"Sometimes my chest—"

"Anxiety." He's already writing on his pad. "Classic presentation. The coughing, the theatrical bleeding—it's psychosomatic. A manifestation of guilt and stress."

Christopher's jaw ticks. "So she's faking it."

"Not consciously, perhaps." The doctor caps his pen with a decisive click. "But the mind can produce very convincing symptoms when seeking attention or absolution. Combined with self-imposed malnutrition—likely an eating disorder stemming from control issues—you have a perfect storm of manufactured crisis."

Holly's hand flies to her mouth. "Oh, Bella. We had no idea it was this serious."

The doctor hands Christopher a prescription. "Anxiety medication. And I'd recommend regular meals, supervised if necessary. She needs structure. Discipline."

He leaves without examining me further. Without checking my pulse or listening to my lungs or asking about the blood I've been hiding in handkerchiefs for weeks.

Christopher folds the prescription into his pocket. "You heard him. This stops now. The dramatics, the victim act—all of it."

I nod because that's all I have left.

---

The patio needs scrubbing. Winter grime has settled into the stone, gray and stubborn. I'm on my hands and knees with a wire brush when I hear the patio door slide open behind me.

Holly's heels click across the stone. She doesn't speak, just stands there, her shadow falling across my work. Then she turns and goes back inside.

Something cold settles in my stomach.

I finish the patio in forty minutes, my knees screaming, my lungs tight. When I return to my storage room, the door is ajar. I always close it. Always.

Inside, my few belongings are disturbed. The spare uniform shifted. The stack of cleaning rags moved. And the hollowed-out copy of Wuthering Heights—the one I found in a box marked for donation, the one I chose because no one reads the classics anymore—is open on the floor.

Empty.

My heart stops.

I tear through the small space, checking under the cot, behind the boxes of Holly's shoes, inside the pockets of my other uniform. Nothing. The locket is gone.

I know who took it. I've always known who she was.

I find her in the living room, curled on the sofa with a magazine, a glass of white wine on the side table. She doesn't look up when I enter.

"Give it back." My voice is steady. Flat.

Holly turns a page. "Give what back?"

"You know what."

Now she looks up, her eyes wide with false innocence. "I have no idea what you're talking about, Bella. Are you feeling alright? Maybe you should take that medication the doctor prescribed."

"The locket. It's mine. It has nothing to do with you or Christopher or any of this."

She sets down the magazine slowly, deliberately. Reaches into her pocket and pulls out the tarnished silver oval. It looks so small in her manicured hand.

"This?" She opens it, studies the lock of hair inside. "Mason. What a sweet name." Her eyes lift to mine, and there's nothing sweet in them. "Mendoza's brat, I assume?"

The room tilts. "Don't."

"Don't what?" She stands, moving toward the kitchen. I follow, my body moving on autopilot. "Don't acknowledge that you spread your legs for a cartel boss? That you gave him a child while Christopher was building an empire to save you?"

"He wasn't Ramon's." The words rip out of me. "He was never—"

"Sure he wasn't." Holly's at the sink now, holding the locket over the drain. The garbage disposal's black mouth waits below. "You know what I think? I think Mendoza's spawn doesn't deserve to be remembered. I think he was probably as worthless as his mother."

She drops the locket.

The sound it makes hitting the metal is small. Final.

"No—" I lunge forward, but Holly's hand is already on the switch.

The disposal roars to life. Metal screams against metal, a grinding, shrieking sound that drowns out my scream. I reach into the drain without thinking, my fingers scraping against the spinning blades, trying to find something, anything—

Holly grabs my wrist, yanks me back. "Are you insane?"

The disposal grinds on. And on. Until there's nothing left but silence and the smell of burnt metal.

Holly flips the switch. The quiet that follows is absolute.

"Oops." She examines her nails. "How clumsy of me."

I stare into the drain. My fingers are bleeding, small cuts from the blades. But I barely feel them. All I feel is the absence. The last piece of Mason—his hair, soft and dark, the only part of him I had left—is gone. Ground to nothing.

Something breaks inside me. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just a quiet snap, like a thread pulled too tight for too long.

I start to laugh.

It bubbles up from somewhere deep, somewhere I didn't know still existed. Holly takes a step back, her confidence flickering.

"Bella?"

The laughter turns to sobs, then back to laughter. I slide down the cabinet, my bloody fingers leaving streaks on the white lacquer, and I can't stop. Can't breathe. Can't think past the sound of metal grinding and a baby crying and Christopher's voice saying *don't contact me again* and Ramon's gun against my father's head and Mason's small body in my arms, so still, so cold—

"What the hell is going on?"

Christopher's voice cuts through the hysteria. He's in the doorway, still in his suit, his eyes moving from Holly to me to the blood on the cabinet.

I look up at him, and I start to laugh again. Because it's all so perfectly awful. So completely, irreversibly broken.

"She's lost it," Holly whispers, backing toward Christopher. "I was just making tea and she attacked the garbage disposal. Chris, I think she's having a breakdown."

But I'm not looking at Holly anymore. I'm looking at Christopher, and for the first time in three years, I'm going to tell him the truth. All of it. Every terrible, beautiful, devastating piece.

Even if it kills me.