Chapter 1156:

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He drew his arm back and slammed the phone into the marble floor with all his strength.

The screen shattered with a sharp crack that echoed through the empty room, magnified a hundredfold by the silence.

He stood there for a long time, his chest heaving with ragged breaths. Then he bent down and picked up the broken phone. The screen was cracked into a spiderweb of fractures, splitting June’s smile into a hundred broken fragments. He wiped the dust from the screen with his cuff, slipped the phone back into his pocket, and reached down for the handle of his suitcase.

He turned and walked toward the door, his leather shoes crunching over the scattered papers, each footstep echoing through the empty house.

His driver was waiting at the front gates. Alexander slid into the back seat, leaned his head against the headrest, and closed his eyes.

“Drive.”

The two words came out flat, entirely without emotion.

The car pulled away slowly. The ornate iron gates swung shut behind them, and the mansion he had lived in his entire life shrank in the rearview mirror until it vanished from sight.

S𝗵𝘢𝗋e 𝘆о𝘶r 𝗍𝗁𝘰u𝗀h𝘵𝘴 𝗈𝗻 𝗴а𝘭ոо𝘷𝖾𝗹𝘴.𝗰о𝗺

When the car passed through downtown Boston and rolled by the building that housed June’s neuroscience foundation, his voice cut through the silence again. “Slow down.”

The car dropped to a crawl. Alexander stared out the window, his gaze fixed on the entrance.

June and Easton were walking out of the front doors together. The wind tangled her hair around her face, and she lifted a hand to push it back. Easton raised his own hand to shield her from the gust — the movement natural, intimate, second nature.

Alexander sat motionless in the back seat, watching, until their figures disappeared around the corner. Only then did he close his eyes again. When he spoke, his voice was colder than ice.

“Drive.”

The car accelerated and merged into the downtown traffic, swallowed up by the stream of cars moving through the Boston streets.

The penthouse apartment in midtown Manhattan was a scene of total destruction.

Shattered shards of crystal figurines littered the white cashmere carpet, glinting in the dim light. A broken wine bottle lay on its side in the corner, dark red wine soaking into the carpet fibers and spreading across the floor in a wide, deep stain. The solid wood coffee table had been overturned, the fine china tea set that had sat on it smashed into a thousand pieces against the floor. A framed painting had been ripped from the wall, its wooden frame split down the middle with a long, jagged crack.

Cole stood in the center of the room, his chest heaving with ragged breaths, the veins in his forehead bulging, his eyes bloodshot and rimmed with red.

His assistant stood in the doorway to the living room, head bowed, body rigid with tension, not daring to step a single foot inside — barely even breathing too loudly.

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