Chapter 1157:

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Cole lifted his head. His gaze locked onto the assistant, cold and sharp as a shard of the broken crystal at his feet. His voice was rough and hoarse, like sandpaper against stone, every word dripping with venom.

“What else. Spit it out. All of it.”

The assistant took a half step forward, head still bowed, his voice shaking so badly the words barely formed. “Sir, the board called again. They’re asking when you’ll be back to chair the meeting. And the team on the ground in Boston called to ask if the plans we arranged are still going ahead.”

Cole stared at him in unblinking silence for a full thirty seconds, until the assistant’s back was soaked with cold sweat and his hands trembled at his sides.

Then Cole spoke, his voice low and flat, every word enunciated with deadly precision.

“All plans are suspended indefinitely. No one is to make a move without my explicit order. No one is to go to Boston. No one is to touch her foundation, her project, her research. Do you understand me?”

𝗦𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗳𝗮𝘃𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗲 𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝗴𝗮𝗹𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹𝘀.𝗰𝗼𝗺

The assistant froze for a fraction of a second, then nodded so rapidly it looked as though his head might come loose. “Yes, sir. I understand completely, sir.”

“Get out.” Cole’s voice was stripped of all warmth, all emotion. “No one is to disturb me without my permission. No one.”

The assistant all but fled the room, pulling the door softly shut behind him and sealing the chaos and the silence inside with Cole.

Cole slid his back down the cold wall until he was sitting on the floor, legs splayed out before him. He pulled his phone from his pocket and opened the photo album, his thumb scrolling slowly through the images stored there.

There were photos from their wedding day — June in a white dress, smiling up at him, her eyes bright and full of love, only him in her gaze. There were photos from their early years together: her in the lab, grinning at the camera over her microscope, her lab coat dusted with work. And then there were the newer photographs, the ones he’d had sent to him — June at the foundation’s opening ceremony in a crisp white suit, radiant and powerful and untouchable, another man standing at her side.

His thumb moved slowly across the screen, tracing her face with a touch so light it was as though he feared breaking the image. His ragged breathing gradually evened out, growing calmer, quieter.

Outside the windows, the sky darkened by degrees, the New York City skyline illuminating itself panel by panel beyond the floor-to-ceiling glass — a million twinkling lights stretching as far as the eye could see, bright and brilliant and endless.

Cole sat in the dark without turning on the lights, without moving, the faint glow of his phone screen illuminating his face every few seconds — casting into sharp relief the unyielding, unquenchable obsession that burned in his eyes, bright and unbroken in the blackness.

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