Chapter 23
It was midnight while I was practicing shooting on the cliff. Just me, the wind, and the sharp metallic click of Cassian’s custom pistol in my hand when I saw him walking toward me. He had that look again, like he wasn’t just here to watch or correct my stance. His face was too calm. Too controlled. That kind of stillness meant one thing with Cassian: bad
news.
He handed me another flash drive. Small. Silver. Deadly.
“This one’s not about Margaret,” he said, voice steady, but his jaw tight. “It’s about your father. And the senator who smiled beside his coffin.”
My hand froze around the grip of the gun.
I didn’t say anything. Just reached out and took it from him.
We sat on the edge of the cliff, moonlight catching the corners of my hair and his shadow blending into mine. He opened his laptop, slid in the flash drive, and clicked.
The first thing I saw was a report, heavily encrypted, marked with blood–stamped headers.
Then a timeline.
“Staged car accident.”
My throat dried.
There were CCTV clips from a nearby toll gate. My father’s black sedan slowed down…only for a van to speed up behind and ram him into the guardrails. No skid marks. No attempt to brake. Intent. Pure intent.
Then came the documents.
Bank transfers.
Offshore account activity.
One name repeated: Senator Raúl Lawrence.
Margaret’s real father.
The same man who posed with a fake tear on his cheek at my father’s funeral.
The same man whose campaign was built off blood money disguised as reforms. The same man who stood grinning with a whisky glass in his hand, just three days after the wreck.
I stared at the screen, blinking slowly.
My nails dug into my thigh.
“My father… died because of them,” I whispered, my voice rougher than I wanted it to be. “Not because he was careless. Not because of the weather. But because he refused to let
criminals buy war behind his name.”
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Cassian didn’t say anything right away. He just leaned forward and reached for my hands, prying them gently open before I tore my own skin apart.
“I didn’t want you to know it,” he murmured, brushing a thumb over my knuckles. “But I needed you to. So you stop blaming fate. So you start aiming sharper. Your father’s death. wasn’t random, Celeste.”
I nodded, but my jaw clenched so tight I felt my teeth pulse.
“I should’ve burned all of them,” I said, my voice low and bitter, “the night they buried him with lies. I should’ve burned the suits, the senators–every last one of them standing over his grave like they didn’t slit his throat with contracts.”
Cassian pulled me closer.
“Then we burn them with the truth,” he said against my hair. “Not in rage. In calculation. That’s how they lose. One signature. One leak. One bullet at a time.”
I closed my eyes and leaned into him. The gun sat heavy in my lap, but it wasn’t enough anymore. Not when the war they started had already carved its name across my family.
With Cassian’s help, I watched Margaret crumble like the porcelain doll she always pretended to be perfect, polished, and so, so fake. The first leaked clips hit the media like lightning through dry forest. Drug money. Dirty offshore accounts. Her father’s political reach stretched like cancer into every charity she paraded for. Kids, widows, cancer victims–Margaret used them like props for photo ops while laundering millions through fake donations and corporate shields.
Cassian’s cyber unit did not miss.
They dropped every file with timestamps, audio recordings, donation trail breakdowns, even voice snippets of her sweet–talking investors while handing them drug lord briefcases. No one saw it coming. And no one defended her. Not this time.
Her sponsors dropped her faster than scandal spreads. The charity shut down within 72 hours. Even journalists who used to call her “Masterson’s Angel” started calling her a fraud and a spoiled psycho who should be locked up before she kills again.
She tried to blame me, of course. Tried to throw my name out in a press release her PR team begged her not to send. “Celeste is actually Harmony Masterson and she’s trying to ruin my life!” She screamed it in all caps like that would save her.
But the world wasn’t listening to her anymore. They were watching me.
And Hakeem? He didn’t even flinch. He stopped making statements in her defense. Didn’t even post a “stand by your wife” type photo. Just disappeared from her side like a ghost. Cassian’s men said he was seen slipping into the back row of my film screening in Barcelona. No cameras. No security. Just him… watching the woman he broke walk a red carpet under a new name with her head high and her back straight like she was never his
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to begin with.
Margaret lost it.
Cassian’s little mole inside her house, the maid with the thick accent and the sharper mind, sent us live updates like she was reporting a riot. Margaret smashed every mirror in her dressing room. Shouted at her reflection. Cried that I wasn’t prettier, that I wasn’t more talented, that I was fake, and the world was blind.
“She’s not real!” she screamed over and over like it would change anything.
She tried to take pills. Filled a tub. Left a note she thought would trend. “Forgive me for loving him too much.” Pathetic.
Her maid found her. Barely breathing. Still alive.
But no press showed up at the hospital. No “save Margaret” hashtags. Not even a single paparazzi outside her private suite.
Hakeem didn’t come.
Not even a fucking flower from the man she burned lives for.
And the cherry?
Her own father, Senator Lawrence, showed up not with love… but with a slap so loud the nurse flinched. He told her she was no longer his daughter. That she was a homewrecker, a stain on his legacy, and that he should’ve cut her loose the moment she started crying
wolf about me.
He left without looking back.
And Margaret?
She woke up with nothing but white walls, her ruined face in a cracked mirror, and the echo of her own name getting dragged through the dirt like the trash she made herself into.
I didn’t lift a finger that night.
Because truth did the work for me.
And Cassian? He poured me wine, kissed my hand, and whispered, “That’s one down.”
I just smiled and said, “Two more to go.”
22:58 Mon, Jul
日
We did it on a stormy Tuesday.
