I was wearing a tailored emerald suit. Every step I took against the marble floor sounded measured, rhythmic, and calm. That was the part Julian never understood about me. Rage does not always arrive screaming, tearing its hair out in a hysterical fit. Sometimes, rage arrives moisturized, impeccably dressed, and carrying irrefutable documentation.
Julian was standing near the altar, laughing with a groomsman. When he spotted me at the rear of the ballroom, his smile cracked so fast I could almost hear the sound of his ego fracturing.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he hissed, striding rapidly down the white silk aisle before any of the ushers could stop him. His eyes darted around, panicked that the press might see me.
I lifted the thick manila envelope between two fingers.
“Giving you what you forgot,” I whispered, my voice carrying only to him. “And taking back what you stole.”
He snatched the envelope from my hand and ripped it open. His face drained of all color as he scanned the first printed page—a log of his IP address pinging the disabled road camera.
But my eyes weren’t on the paper. My eyes were drawn to his left wrist.
There, peeking out from beneath the crisp white cuff of his tuxedo shirt, was a vintage 1968 Rolex Daytona. It had a faded black dial and a scratched steel bezel. It was a one-of-a-kind timepiece. It was my late father’s watch.
Julian had cạy open my personal safe the day he filed the custody papers and stolen it. And now, the absolute audacity of the man—he was wearing my dead father’s watch to his own fraudulent wedding.
For one beautiful, terrifying second, the room kept moving around him. The string quartet played on. The candles flickered. Polite laughter echoed from the VIP tables. But Julian’s future had just collapsed into total, suffocating silence.
“Julian, what is this?” Victoria demanded, appearing suddenly at his side in a cloud of white tulle and diamonds. She looked from his ashen face to the documents trembling in his hands.