“End the engagement? And what right do you have to say that? Does the Carter Group no longer want to survive?”
“And besides me, who else in the circle would dare marry you now? Emma, your reputation is already rotten beyond repair.”
“Or do you, the grand heiress of the Carter family, really intend to marry that crippled security guard?”
The calm I had found cracked into a stab of pain. So he knew—he knew everything his fiancée had suffered. Yet for the sake of venting Chloe’s anger, for the sake of forcing me and my family to accept his twisted bond with her, he had condoned it all.
Whatever affection we once shared evaporated into nothing.
The engagement ring on my finger suddenly felt unbearably heavy. In silence, I slid it off and held it out to him.
That diamond was one we had traveled to the source to choose together. Its design had come after a hundred failed sketches. We had even learned from a master jeweler for a year to set the stone ourselves.
He said a ring filled with such love would surely bind us until death, and he made me promise never to take it off.
But now, I no longer wanted it.