“Hi Rosália!” Katherine chirped, her voice a little too loud for the intimate setting. “You look absolutely stunning tonight. Oh, we just finished eating—you absolutely have to try the dark chocolate fondant, it’s life-changing!”
As Katherine babbled to Rosália about the dessert menu, David deliberately picked up his wine glass. He looked away, staring a hole into the opposite wall, completely ignoring the younger woman as if she were entirely beneath his notice.
Rosália, ever the empathetic diplomat, couldn’t stand her husband’s blatant snobbery. Under the cover of Katherine’s nervous chatter, Rosália shot David a pointed, scolding look. She gently shook her head, silently pleading with him to stop being so unsympathetic. Katherine was a sweet, harmless neighbor, and David was acting like she didn’t even exist.
David refused to meet her eye, a muscle feathering violently in his jaw.
But Sean caught the silent reprimand between husband and wife.
One of his dark eyebrows arched slowly in genuine amusement. His eyes met Rosália’s, dark, heavy, and knowing.
When Katherine finally turned back, tugging gently on Sean’s arm to pull him toward the exit, they exchanged their formal goodbyes. Before Sean could completely step away, Rosália leaned in just a fraction, lowering her voice so only he could hear over the din of the restaurant, feeling the need to apologize for her husband’s icy behavior.
“David you need to stop being so rude to her,” she murmured gently “One day, people are going to notice how badly you treat her.”
He gave a slow, careless shrug of his broad shoulders, a devastating smirk playing on his lips.
“It doesn’t matter.”
He held her gaze and Rosália just shook her head.
Chapter 4
Rosália
TheAxiomgallery was Lumen’s fiercest competitor, a stark, brutalist expanse of polished concrete and suspended lighting on the west side of the city. To anyone else, it was just a building. To Rosália, it was a sanctuary where the air tasted sharply of turpentine, linseed oil, and raw, unfiltered human emotion.
She wasn’t there as a director today, but as an addict seeking a fix. The heavy, double-breasted trench coat draped over her shoulders offered the only warmth in the aggressively climate-controlled room.
She walked slowly, the rhythmic click of her heels swallowed by the cavernous space, until she stopped in front of the exhibition’s centerpiece. It was a massive, imposing canvas by a notoriously reclusive painter she had admired for years.
Rosália stood perfectly still, letting the painting devour her vision. It was a violently chaotic piece—a furious, sweeping storm of midnight blues, bruised purples, and jagged, bleeding slashes of crimson. It looked like rage. It looked like destruction. But Rosália didn’t just look at art; she read it on a cellular level.
She stepped closer, so close she could see the shadow of the brush bristles in the thick oil paint. Beneath the aggressive, chaotic topcoats, she saw the tragic truth. The artist hadpainstakingly painted a delicate, perfectly structured domestic scene—a quiet, beautiful foundation. And then, in a fit of absolute madness or despair, they had taken a palette knife and violently scratched it out, burying the beauty under a mess that could no longer be controlled.
Fractured reality,Rosália thought, a cold shiver trailing down her spine.The illusion of a perfect life, suffocating under a darkness you refuse to acknowledge.
She stood there for nearly an hour, her chest tightening with a profound, unnamed ache. The painting resonated with a dull, throbbing frequency inside her ribs, echoing a truth about her own life that she was too terrified to look at directly.
By midnight, her house was a mausoleum.
Rosália sat on the edge of the master bed, her knees pulled tight to her chest. She wore nothing but a sheer, champagne-colored silk slip that left her shoulders bare to the cool air conditioning. The only light came from the dim, golden glow of the bedside lamp, casting long, lonely shadows against the immaculate walls.
12:15 AM.Ten minutes later, the heavy thud of the front door unlocking drifted up the grand staircase.
Rosália stopped breathing. She listened to the heavy, dragging footsteps echoing in the foyer. The soft slap of David’sleather briefcase hitting the floor. The agonizingly slow ascent up the stairs.
When he finally stepped into the bedroom, he looked like a ghost of the man she had married. His tie was gone, his collar unbuttoned, and a dark shadow of utter exhaustion clung to the sharp angles of his jaw. He didn’t even look at the bed. He walked blindly past her, entirely consumed by whatever dark thoughts were haunting him, and went straight into the master bathroom.
A moment later, the hiss of the shower echoed through the room, thick, heavy steam beginning to roll out from the open door and bleed into the cold bedroom.
Rosália closed her eyes. Her heart hammered a frantic, desperate rhythm against her ribs.Fight for this,she told herself.Fight for him.
She slipped off the edge of the mattress, her bare feet silent against the cold hardwood, and walked into the humid, fogged-up bathroom.
Through the frosted glass of the massive walk-in shower, she could see the blurred silhouette of her husband. His head was bowed, his hands braced flat against the marble tile as the punishing stream of scalding water beat down on his shoulders.
Trembling slightly, she reached out and pulled open the heavy glass door. She stepped directly into the spray.
