Chapter Twenty-Six: The Unreachable Fortress
Hope is a dangerous thing.
It doesn't arrive loudly. It doesn't announce itself as foolish. It flickers—small, fragile, almost merciful—right when you think there's nothing left to lose.
That was how it came to me.
In the quiet aftermath of my family's decision, after Julian's name had been laid over my future like a clean white shroud, something restless stirred in the ruins of my heart. A single, desperate thought refused to die.
He doesn't know.
The idea was irrational. I knew that. Rowan Royce was not a man who missed details. He was a man who engineered outcomes. And yet, the hope persisted, stubborn and aching.
What if he didn't know they were doing this to me?
What if, despite everything, despite his cruelty and calculated silence, he would care—just enough—to stop it?
Before reason could smother it, my hands were already shaking as I unlocked my phone.
I called him.
The line didn't ring.
The number you have dialed is not in service.
The mechanical voice felt like a door slamming shut in my face.
I stared at the screen, my breath shallow. That wasn't an accident. Rowan didn't change numbers casually. He erased them. Cleanly. Intentionally.
A cold sweat broke out along my spine.
I tried again. Same message.
Panic clawed its way into my chest as I opened every social platform I could think of. Instagram. LinkedIn. Even the obscure messaging app he'd once mentioned in passing.
Nothing.
His profiles were gone—or I was blocked so thoroughly they might as well have never existed. The effect was chilling. It wasn't just avoidance. It was total digital annihilation. He hadn't just removed access.
He had fortified himself.
I pressed my phone to my chest, fighting the sudden dizziness.
He erased me.
Not from his life—but from his reachable world.
The realization hit with brutal clarity. This wasn't the impulsive cruelty of a man lashing out. This was premeditated. He had anticipated this moment—the reaching out, the breaking point, the plea. And he had prepared for it the way one prepares for an invasion.
With walls.
With silence.
With an unreachable fortress.
A broken thought screamed inside my head.
Doesn't he know?
Doesn't he know how deep the knife went?
Doesn't he know that even now—even now—my heart still beats his name like a wound that won't close?
The idea that he might not know—that he might be moving through his days untouched by this latest fracture in my life—was somehow worse than his hatred. Hatred, at least, acknowledged my existence.
This… this meant I was already archived.
The experiment was over.
The data collected.
The subject discarded.
He wasn't watching the aftermath.
I don't remember deciding to go to his office.
I don't remember buying the train ticket or walking through the station. My body moved on instinct, driven by a last, humiliating surge of adrenaline. As if my heart, in its death throes, had seized control of my limbs.
The Royce corporate tower rose from the street like a monument to power—glass, steel, and ruthless symmetry. It gleamed under the afternoon sun, untouchable and aloof.
Inside, the lobby hummed with quiet efficiency. Polished shoes on marble. Muted voices. People who belonged.
I did not.
The receptionist looked up as I approached, her smile professional and practiced.
"Yes?"
"I need to see Rowan Royce," I said. My voice sounded thin, foreign to my own ears.
Her fingers paused over the keyboard for a fraction of a second.
"I'm sorry, Miss. Mr. Royce is not available. He is not taking any unscheduled meetings."
"I don't need a meeting," I whispered. "Please. Just tell him Aira Grace is here. Just tell him that."
Her smile didn't waver. "I can't do that."
Something in my expression must have shifted—fractured—because her tone softened just slightly. "I have my instructions."
Instructions.
The word echoed like a gunshot.
He had anticipated this.
He had issued orders.
I wasn't just unwanted—I was expected.
A protocol had been established for me. I was on a list. A denied entity. A risk to be neutralized through distance and procedure.
My knees felt weak.
"So that's it?" I asked quietly. "You won't even pass on my name?"
She met my eyes then, and for the briefest moment, something like pity flickered there. "I'm sorry."
I stumbled backward, turning before she could see the tears spill. The revolving doors swallowed me and spat me back into the daylight, where the city felt too bright, too loud, too alive for the devastation blooming inside my chest.
The truth descended like a physical weight.
He knew.
Of course he knew.
Men like Rowan Royce didn't miss developments like this. The proposal, the arrangement—it would already be folded into his intelligence stream, categorized and analyzed. The Grace family securing their volatile asset. A predictable response.
He would see it not as tragedy, but as efficiency.
It would tie off the loose end he himself had created.
A neat resolution.
The final, fraying thread of hope snapped cleanly inside me.
He is letting me go.
He is letting them give me to another man.
Not because he doesn't care—but because it serves the cold narrative he wrote. The innocent Grace, punished, then removed from the board. A finished story with no dangling threads.
I walked.
I don't know for how long.
The city blurred past me—streets, faces, sounds—all distant and unreal. My body moved, but my heart stayed behind, locked in that glass tower, sealed in a vault he no longer visited.
My love for him didn't die that day.
It transformed.
It curdled into something permanent and aching—a ghost-limb that would always hurt, even though it was no longer there. He had taken my heart and sealed it away, not caring whether it withered or bled, as long as it was no longer his problem.
The news would reach him.
It already had.
And his silence—absolute, impregnable—was his answer.
Marry him, that silence said.
It changes nothing for me.
I stopped walking when my legs finally gave out, sinking onto a cold bench beneath a leafless tree. I pressed my palms over my face and let the tears come—not violently, not dramatically, but quietly. The way things ended now. Without witnesses. Without meaning.
The final cruelty wasn't his revenge.
Nor my family's cold arrangement.
It was his peace.
Rowan Royce had shattered my life—and walked away unburdened, untouched, serene.
And I understood then, with devastating clarity:
I could scream into the world until my throat bled,
but nothing—nothing—would ever breach the walls of his fortress again.