Silas Vale had never been the kind to share. Especially not when it came to what he wanted, and he wanted Grace. Badly. Watching her walk into that awards ceremony with Julian felt like a blade dragging through velvet. Silent, but ruinous.
Back in his penthouse, bathed in cold light and colder silence, Silas sat before a wall of screens, each showing a different angle of Grace's apartment. Her walk. Her smile. Her laugh. He studied her the way artists once studied muses, only his gaze wasn't pure. It was possessive.
Julian's hand on Grace's back played on repeat in his head.
He clenched his jaw. That man didn't deserve her. Not even close.
And if Grace couldn't see it yet, Silas would show her.
He called in a favor, a powerful one. Not the kind you owed, the kind you paid dearly for. His men had dug through Julian's life, every whisper and every shadow. It didn't take long to uncover what Silas needed.
Julian had a past. A messy, expensive, very buried one. There were texts. Messages from interns. Manipulated contracts. A lawsuit quietly paid off to avoid scandals. Nothing that ever made the headlines, but enough to shatter the clean image he painted for Grace.
Silas didn't hesitate. He sent the dossier anonymously. No theatrics, just cold, hard proof delivered to her inbox late one night.
There were texts, hundreds of them, sent to interns and junior models during his earlier days at a rival agency. Messages that started professional and turned disturbingly personal. Promises of promotions in exchange for nights out. Silas's men had traced one particular thread: a girl named Liana, just nineteen at the time, who disappeared from the industry after filing a complaint that mysteriously vanished.
Then came the forged invoices, money funneled through shell accounts, contracts rewritten in the middle of the night. One of Julian's ex-partners in a startup agency had sued him for breach of trust, but it was settled behind closed doors, the court records sealed and silenced with a massive payout.
There were whispers, too. About a girl in Paris. About an overdose in a hotel suite. Nothing that stuck. Nothing that screamed guilt. But enough that a pattern emerged, and Silas, in all his twisted patience, had pulled the thread until the whole thing unraveled.
Grace stared at the screen, horror morphing into heartbreak as she read page after page. This wasn't a misunderstanding. It wasn't a smear campaign. The evidence was clinical, brutal, and undeniable.
Julian had lied. Not just about who he was, but about who he was capable of being.
Her phone buzzed.
Julian: "What have you decided, Grace? Can we talk about it?"
He had no idea what she knew. No clue that his spotless image had shattered in her eyes. His voice was casual, pleading, but blind.
Grace didn't reply.
Her mind spun. Silas's charm. Julian's betrayal. And that strange feeling, a sense of safety when she was around Silas. It made no sense. Nothing about him should've felt safe.
But suddenly, everything about Julian felt dangerous.
Later that night, she sat alone on her balcony, the city humming beneath her. The silence inside was louder than the noise outside. She deleted Julian's number.
Back in his penthouse, Silas watched her reaction unfold through his screens. She was quiet. Thoughtful. Her face unreadable to most, but not to him. He saw the shift. The betrayal settling in.
She wouldn't run to him yet. But she would. He'd just cleared the first obstacle.
Love wasn't war. War had rules.
Silas didn't.