Chapter 3 - The Engagement Ring on the TableClarissa’s manicured hand gripped the gold handle of her designer handbag so tightly her knuckles turned white. Her eyes swept over my tailored blazer, taking in my calm, unyielding posture before snapping back to Sebastian.
"What is she doing here?" Clarissa demanded, her voice rising an octave as she crossed the Persian rug toward us. "Sebastian, the society pages are running our engagement layout tomorrow morning. My father is downstairs trying to calm down three different vice presidents because your grandfather’s security director is currently locked in a shouting match with the legal department. Who is this woman?"
Sebastian didn't even look at her. His eyes remained fixed on me, heavy with a suffocating mix of guilt and desperate pleading.
"Clarissa, leave," Sebastian said, his voice flat, cold, and entirely devoid of the polite warmth he usually reserved for his social circle.
Clarissa stopped short, her mouth dropping open in sheer disbelief. "Leave? Are you out of your mind? I am your fiancée! We are announcing our union at the winter gala next week, and you’re standing in your office with your ex-wife—the nobody your family spent years erasing—looking like the world just ended?"
"She isn't just my ex-wife, Clarissa," Sebastian turned slowly, his tall frame towering over her as he delivered the sentence that shattered whatever illusions she had left. "She is the mother of my children. My three-year-old triplets."
The silence in the penthouse was so absolute you could hear the distant hum of the elevator motors thirty floors below.
Clarissa blinked once, twice, as if trying to translate a foreign language she refused to understand. "Triplets? You... you have children? With her?"
"Our children," I corrected smoothly, stepping forward so I stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Sebastian—not as a submissive partner, but as an equal combatant. "And unlike your engagement, Clarissa, they are actual flesh and blood. Not a corporate merger dressed up in a diamond ring."
Clarissa’s face flushed a violent, mottled crimson. She turned her fury onto Sebastian, her voice trembling with rage. "You lied to me! Your family told me you were unattached, that your previous marriage was a brief, insignificant mistake that had been legally annulled and buried! If the board finds out you have illegitimate heirs—if the press gets hold of this—"
"Let them print it on the front page of the New York Times," Sebastian interrupted, his voice dropping to a dangerous, icy growl. "Let my grandfather try to sue me. Let the board vote me out. I don't give a damn about the dynasty anymore, Clarissa. My children were hidden from me for four years by my own flesh and blood, and right now, the only thing keeping me from burning this entire corporation to the ground is the fact that I’m trying to figure out how to look their mother in the eye and ask for forgiveness."
Clarissa stared at him, realizing with terrifying clarity that she had never truly possessed him. The engagement was a strategy, a chess move on the grand board of Chicago high society—and she had just been checkmated by ghosts from Sebastian’s past.
She snatched her handbag back, glared at me with pure, unfiltered venom, and hissed, "You'll regret this. All of you." Then she spun on her heel and stormed out of the penthouse, slamming the heavy oak doors behind her with a resounding crash.
The room fell silent once more.
Sebastian exhaled a long, shuddering breath, dropping his head into his hands for a brief second before looking back up at me. "She’s gone. The engagement is over. It was never real, Evelyn—just like the divorce papers weren't real in my heart. I’ve spent four years hating myself for letting you go."
"Don't talk to me about hearts and feelings, Sebastian," I said, my voice hardening like steel. "You lost the right to talk about what's in your heart the moment you let your grandfather dictate our lives. You folded. You let them win."
"I was twenty-four!" he fired back, taking a step toward me, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. "My father had just died, the board was trying to strip my voting shares, and my grandfather held all the cards. I thought I was protecting you from being destroyed!"
"And instead, you destroyed me yourself," I whispered, the raw truth of those four lonely years finally breaking through my armor. "You left me to carry three babies alone. You left me to sit in a hospital room while my sister held my hand through postpartum hemorrhages and neonatal ICU scares. You weren't protecting me, Sebastian. You were taking the coward's way out."
Sebastian flinched as if I had struck him across the face. He didn't argue. He didn't defend himself. He just stood there, letting my words cut deep, because he knew every syllable was earned.
"I know," he whispered hoarsely. "I know I don't deserve to breathe the same air as you, let alone look at my children. But please... Evelyn. Just give me one chance. Let me see them. Let me prove to you that I am not the coward I was four years ago."
I looked at him for a long, agonizing moment, weighing the risk, the danger, and the undeniable truth that my children deserved to know their father—provided he was strong enough to stand up to the monsters who created him.
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"You want to see them?" I asked quietly, grabbing my briefcase from the desk. "Meet me at my apartment at five o'clock. Not as a billionaire heir. Not as a corporate executive. Just as a man asking for a second chance. If you're late, or if you bring even one of your grandfather's bodyguards with you... you will never see us again."
Without waiting for his answer, I turned, walked to the private elevator, and pressed the button down.
