“She’s terrified of heights, sir,” came the butler’s nervous voice from somewhere in the background. “It’s been a whole day. Shouldn’t we let her back in?”
But Lucien only scoffed. “Scared of heights? She’s faking it. Just like she faked that innocent act after trying to kill Vanessa.”
Vanessa.
Of course.
She was always the center of everything now. The sweet girl from Lucien’s past who came back like a storm—beautiful, manipulative, and impossibly fragile in his eyes. He never asked for my side of the story. Not after that day in the mountains.
I’d received a text from him, asking me to meet at one of those high-elevation tourist spots. I didn’t question it. Despite my fear of heights, I went. I still had hope. Hope that he was trying to fix what was broken between us.
But it wasn’t Lucien who waited there.
It was Vanessa.
She greeted me with a sneer masked behind a saccharine smile. “You don’t belong in his life,” she whispered like venom.
And then—she screamed.