A Love That Never Existed Chapter 39
Damiel tugged at his tie, but the pressure crushing his chest refused to lift.
He turned and bolted from the boardroom.
The moment he dropped into the back of the car, he barked two words at his driver.
“The estate.”
He went straight to the small chapel tucked at the back of the garden.
When he pushed the door open, Cordella was kneeling in the front pew with her rosary, lips moving in quiet prayer.
She didn’t so much as turn at the sound.
“I told you not to interrupt me while I’m praying.”
“Mom.”
Damiel stood in the doorway, his voice so ragged it barely sounded like his own.
Cordella’s fingers stilled on the beads.
She turned, and her brow knit at the look on her son’s face.
“What is it? You look awful. Is it the company?”
Damiel didn’t answer.
He just stood there, eyes fixed on her.
“Three years ago, you gave Yvosha one hundred million dollars, didn’t you?”
Cordella’s fingers tightened, just for an instant, around her rosary.
It was barely a second, but Damiel saw it.
In that flicker, the last fragment of hope inside him went out.
“Who told you that?” Cordella quickly smoothed her features and moved to a chair nearby. “You found Yvosha? She’s furious. You can’t take everything she says at face value.”
“I’m asking you – did you, or didn’t you?”
Damiel’s voice rose, fraying at the edges.
He stepped closer, his eyes rimmed red.
“Tell me. Those three years… was it all just a deal?”
Cordella knew she couldn’t hold the line any longer.
She let out a long breath.
“Yes.”
One single word.
The strength seemed to drain straight out of Damiel’s body.
He had to brace a hand on the edge of the table to keep from going down.
“Why?”
“At the time, your father was on his deathbed and the company was on shaky ground. The two of you wanted a divorce, and I had to find some way to hold the marriage together.”
Cordella picked up her rosary again.
“You’ve been divorced for five years. Does it really matter now whether or not she loved you?”
“Does it matter?”
Damiel let out a broken, jagged laugh and pressed a hand against his chest.
“Then what have the last five years even been for? I thought she loved me enough to lay down her life for me. I thought I was the one who’d failed her. I tortured myself for five years like an absolute fool-“
“And now you’re telling me it was just a contract?”
The memories that had eaten at him with guilt and remorse, that had jerked him awake in the dead of night, were warping into something grotesque.
No love.
No devotion.
Only contracts, sums, fine print.
In Yvosha’s eyes, he had never been anything more than a job assignment.
Damiel swept his arm across the table, sending the tea set crashing to the floor.
Boiling tea splashed across his trousers, but he didn’t seem to feel it.
He collapsed into a chair, dropped his face into his hands, and his shoulders began to shake.
“She never loved me… But I fell in love with her.”
