I do not even understand.
Everyone is thinking I killed him.
The whispers were no longer whispers. They were stares that clung to my stained dress like cobwebs.
The police said the CCTV server was offline for exactly seven minutes—the precise window of the murder. The security guards recalled nothing; they claimed their coffee had tasted oddly sweet.
I didn't. How could I?
My own mind felt like a crime scene I was stumbling through. But their logic was a net closing around me: I had motive humiliation, termination, debt. I had opportunity ,the empty hallway. And now, the perfect, professional lack of evidence pointed not away from me, but toward a chilling competence I didn't possess.
Even Sophia looked at me differently. Her concern had hardened into a wary, calculating distance. Her eyes would find mine, then dart away, as if checking to see if my hands were clean.
Why do people assume silence means you're hiding something? But they were right. I was hiding something—a truth far more dangerous than the lie they suspected.
Lucian Throne killed him, the evidence was clear to me.
The weight of it—the slap, the assault, the gunshot, the suspicion—tightened into a vise around my lungs.I couldn't breathe in that building.
I left the first second I could, fleeing the hushed accusations and the yellow tape. The bus ride was a blur. I walked the last few blocks to the Hart house in a daze, the cold pavement biting through my stockings.
I pushed the door open, the familiar creak now sounding like an indictment. I kicked off my shoes, the simple act feeling impossibly heavy.
"Camilla."
The voice was deep, gravelly. It wasn't Elara's shrill malice. It was Bran's father, Gregory Hart, standing in the dim hallway like a monument to disapproval. He was rarely home, a ghost in his own house. For him to be here, waiting…
I turned, bowing my head slightly out of exhausted habit.
His gaze was not angry. It was worse. It was cold, judicial. He looked at me as if examining a flawed piece of evidence.
"You're acting strange," he stated, his voice devoid of its usual detached indifference. It was full of a new, focused intensity. "Mr. Charles is dead."
He took a slow step forward, his eyes never leaving my face. "Did you kill him?"
His words weren't a question. They were a verdict, delivered with the cold finality of a judge protecting his court.
He thought I killed him just like others.
"No. I didn't," I said, my voice flat, all the fight drained out of it.
He didn't blink. "I hope so." He took another step, his shadow falling over me. "Do not tarnish the name of this family. Any more than you already have."
He wasn't worried about me. He wasn't worried about justice. He was worried about the brand. The Hart name. The social capital that could be stained by association with a cleaner, a scandal, a murder.
"It would… complicate things for Elara," he continued, his voice dropping to a confidential, icy register. "Her prospects. Her standing. We will not let you destroy her life.Do you understand?!"
He wasn't asking if I'd killed a man. He was telling me to disappear if I had. To vanish and take the blame with me, silently, so his daughter's dinner party invitations wouldn't dry up.
The sheer, transactional cruelty of it hit me like a physical blow. I felt a small, almost imperceptible flinch in my jaw.
"Go," he said, dismissing me with a flick of his eyes toward the stairs.
I didn't bow. I just couldn't speak.
What words do I have to say to him?
I turned and walked upstairs, each step an effort. The door to my room—the room that was never mine—yawned open like a mouth waiting to swallow me whole.
I leaned against it, the silence roaring in my ears.
I couldn't keep this to myself.
The pressure of the secret—the slap, the assault, the murder, the contract—was a physical weight on my windpipe. I had to tell someone. I had to hear a voice that wasn't dripping with blame or cold calculation.
Sophia.
She would understand. She had to. She was my oldest friend. The one who'd pushed a blushing Bran toward me on her sofa, who'd laughed about popcorn. She knew the person I was before the world ended.
Without letting myself think, I moved. I left the room, passed Elara's closed door without a sound, and slipped back out into the cooling evening. The air was a relief after the suffocating atmosphere of the Hart house.
Sophia's house wasn't far. A twenty-minute walk through streets that grew gradually quieter. My feet knew the way by heart.
I'd lived with her for a year after my parents died, before Bran, before any of this. Her family had taken me in when I had nowhere else to go. Her couch had been my bed, her mother's cooking my only hot meals, her stubborn friendship the only light in a world that had gone dark. Her home had been more of a home to me than any place since. It was a place of borrowed sweaters and shared secrets, of shelter when I had none.
Or so I'd believed.
Now, as I turned onto her street, my steps began to slow. Doubt, cold and slick, twisted in my stomach. The foundation of our friendship had already cracked with her strange, wary look at the office. Was I about to shatter it completely by pouring this nightmare inside?
But I had no choice. The words were burning a hole in me.
I reached her building, a neat brick duplex. Her lights were on, glowing warmly behind the curtains. A glimpse of a normal, steady life that felt a universe away from my own.
Taking a shaky breath, I walked up the path and rang the bell. The sound echoed in the quiet street, a hopeful, terrifying chime.
I waited, my heart a frantic prisoner in my chest, clinging to the crumbling memory of what this door had once meant.
This was my only sanctuary.
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To be continued...