You are just a seventeen-year-old child playing at adult games, Maya, and by tomorrow morning you will have nothing left in this company, my mentor and fiancé Julian Driscoll told me, shoving me...
I stared at the screen, then at Julian. The **$22,000,000** figure burned into my mind. Bankruptcy. My grandfather’s legacy, gone. All because of Marcus Driscoll’s reckless greed.
“Evelyn,” I whispered, the name catching in my throat. “She wasn’t… she wasn’t your lover?”
Julian shook his head, a ghost of a bitter smile on his lips. “No, Maya. Evelyn Pierce was Marcus Driscoll’s financial auditor. She was sent here to seize the company’s code, to find any weakness, any loophole Marcus could exploit to force the lien into effect.”
He walked back to the window, his gaze sweeping over the grey, indifferent cityscape. “She’s good at her job. Too good. I couldn’t get her off the scent.”
He paused, then turned to face me, his expression etched with a profound, weary honesty. “I had to give you an indisputable reason to cut ties with me. A reason so public, so undeniable, that the board wouldn’t hesitate to invoke your clause.”
My breath hitched. The pieces slammed together in my mind, forming a horrifying, devastating picture. The cold shove. The dismissive words. The video of Evelyn in the closet. The overnight smear campaign.
“You staged it,” I whispered, the words barely audible. “You purposefully staged the closet scene. You leaked those smear articles yourself.”
He nodded, his eyes holding mine. “I needed to create a moral breach so clear, so egregious, that you would be forced to invoke the expired trust clause. It was the only way to clean-sever your technology from my ruinous debt.”
The revelation hit me like a physical blow. He hadn’t betrayed me for money or power. He had engineered his own downfall.
“By stripping me of power publicly,” Julian continued, his voice tight with suppressed emotion, “you saved your grandfather’s legacy. While leaving me to bear the **$22,000,000** in personal liabilities alone.”
The enormity of his sacrifice crashed over me. He had allowed me to hate him, to think the worst, to believe he was a corrupt, greedy monster. All so I would act, so I would activate the clause that would protect me from his father’s financial wreckage.
“But… why?” I asked, my voice barely a thread. My vision blurred. “Why didn’t you just tell me?”
He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them, a raw, aching pain in their depths. “Because you would have tried to save me, Maya. You would have fought for me, and in doing so, you would have become entangled in Marcus’s mess. I couldn’t let that happen. Not to you. Not to your grandfather’s dream.”
He took a step towards me, then stopped. “I never stopped loving you, Maya. Not once.”
His gaze was intense, full of a quiet, desperate sorrow. “But I knew, the moment I decided to do this, that you could never openly be with me again. Not after I was ruined. Not after I made you hate me.”
He looked away, towards the skyline. “It was the only way to keep you safe.”
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