Thank you, sir.
I’d accepted his dismissal like a dog accepting a kick. He'd taken me apart with that riding crop, watched me shatter into subspace, stroked me to orgasm while tears ran down my face. And when I'd surfaced, raw and desperate and needing something I couldn't name, I'd thanked him for the privilege of being used.
Then he'd gotten dressed and walked out, just like the plane.
I picked up the tablet again and told myself to focus on the briefing.
The cursor blinked on the screen. I'd written the same sentence three times.
You're just convenient.
He'd said that on the plane. After he'd fucked me for the first time in thirty-two years, after I'd given him everything I had, he'd pulled out and told me I was convenient. That it changed nothing. That we'd pretend it never happened.
And I'd accepted it. Cleaned myself up, prepared his briefing, sat across from him in silence while his cum dried on the sheets twelve feet away. Because that's what I did. That's what I'd always done.
The tablet screen had gone dark. I didn't remember setting it down.
I was moving before I made the conscious decision, going out of the study, down the hallway, toward the door of his private office. My bare feet made no sound on the hardwood.
I should go back and finish the briefing and be useful. That was the only value I had left.
But my hand was already on the door handle, and my body wouldn't obey the commands my brain was sending.
I pushed the door open without knocking.
Algerone looked up from his desk, surprise flickering across his face before he controlled it. He'd poured himself a whiskey. The glass sat half-empty beside Xavier's security report, amber liquid catching the lamplight.
"The briefing isn't finished," he said.
"No."
I stepped into the room and closed the door behind me. My heart was pounding so hard I could hear it in my ears.
His eyes narrowed. "Then why are you here?"
"Because I need to say something." I took a deep breath. "And if I don't say it now, I never will."
He leaned back in his chair, watching me, waiting.
"I killed Imogen."
The words dropped into the silence like stones into water.
"Not directly. I didn't push her into that bathtub or put the razor in her hand. But I killed her all the same." I forced myself to hold his gaze. "She came to me six weeks after the boys were born. She was falling apart. I could see it. The paranoia, the delusions, the way her hands shook. She begged me to help her tell you about your sons."
Algerone's expression didn't change, but his knuckles whitened around his whiskey glass.
"And I looked at her, this broken woman holding photographs of your children, and I thought: she's an obstacle. Not a person. Not a mother. Not someone who needed help. An obstacle to your empire. To your focus. To everything I'd spent a decade helping you build."
I took a breath and kept going.
"So I threatened her. Told her what would happen if she ever contacted you. Made her believe I'd destroy her, take her children, leave her with nothing. I watched her crumble in front of me, and I felt nothing but satisfaction because I'd eliminated a problem."
My voice cracked, but I didn't stop.
"She killed herself three weeks later. And I buried it. For twenty years, I buried it. I told myself it was for your own good, that you didn't need the distraction, that the empire was more important. But that was a lie. The truth is I wanted her gone because I was jealous. Because she'd given you something I never could. Because a part of me was glad when she died."
The confession hung in the air between us, ugly and raw and true.
