Chapter 11 - The Disintegration of the Contract
The room fell into a suffocating, razor-sharp silence.
The four paramedics paused for a fraction of a second, their gloved hands hovering over their medical bags, before Dr. Harrison snapped his fingers violently to bring their focus back to the dying woman.
"Ignore her! Prepare the spinal block!" Harrison ordered.
Marcus stepped slowly toward Victoria. He looked at her torn dress, he looked at the neat scratches on her neck, and then he looked into her eyes—really looked into them—for the first time since he had stepped through the front door.
He saw no grief. He saw no shock. He saw only a frantic, desperate desire to control the narrative, to preserve the crime scene, to ensure that Elena was condemned before she could draw another breath.
"A crime scene?" Marcus whispered, his voice trembling with a dark, terrifying realization. "My wife is dying on the sofa... my child is suffocating in her womb... and you are worried about a crime scene?"
"Marcus, listen to me!" Victoria pleaded, reaching out to grab his arm, her manicured nails digging into his wet tuxedo sleeve. "She tried to kill me! If you let them do this here, if you clean up the blood, her lawyers will say we tampered with the evidence! My father will pull the Vance capital! The merger will collapse!"
Marcus looked down at her hand on his arm.
In that single, agonizing second, the scales fell completely from his eyes. He saw the cold, monstrous architecture of Victoria’s mind—a mind that viewed a dying mother and an unborn child as nothing more than legal liabilities on a corporate balance sheet.
He realized, with a wave of sickening nausea, what he had done. He had allowed this viper into his home. He had listened to her soft, poisonous whispers for months. He had allowed his own arrogance, his own obsession with corporate order, to blind him to the danger hovering over his wife.
Marcus reached down, grabbed Victoria’s wrist, and twisted it back with cold, merciless force until she let out a sharp cry of pain.
"I don't give a damn about your father," Marcus whispered, his face inches from hers, his voice dripping with pure, unadulterated venom. "I don't give a damn about the merger. If my family dies tonight... I will tear your father’s company apart with my bare hands."
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He shoved her backward with such force that Victoria stumbled, her heels catching on the rug, crashing heavily against the marble hearth of the fireplace.
"Get her out of my sight," Marcus barked to the security guard who had just rushed into the foyer. "Lock her in the study. If she tries to leave, break her legs."
