Free Web NovelChapter 14: Every Year Will Cost
In the morning the scandal had already been pushed aside by whatever the entertainment cycle had decided mattered more that day. But something else was building quietly underneath the noise. The people who had found me through the Crown’s Star shoot had been going back through old footage. They had been sharing it across Twitter and Instagram, tagging each other, sending it to Lumière Étoile’s official accounts directly, filling comment sections with photographs and timestamps showing exactly what I had done with that bracelet and exactly how it had looked.
Marcel Fontaine had had time to think. The initial anger from being deceived had faded and what was left when it cleared was the memory of what he had actually seen in that studio. A model who had taken an impossible situation and made it into something nobody in the room was going to forget. He called a meeting with his team. They reached their conclusion without much debate. Then he picked up the phone and called Liam’s office.
"Mr. Liam. I want to swap the spokesperson. I want Valerie instead of Amara."
Liam scrambled immediately. "Mr. Fontaine, I do not think that is the right direction for the brand. Amara has an established following and —"
"We have not signed a contract yet," Marcel said. "If you will not agree to Valerie, we will find another agency to partner with entirely."
"We have other models. Bigger names, more visibility —"
"We want Valerie."
The line went quiet. Marcel hung up.
Liam sat at his desk staring at his phone for a long time after that. That deal had been the foundation of everything he had promised Amara. It was her path to the Top Ten Model Awards. He was going to have to call her and tell her it was gone. And Amara was not the kind of woman who accepted that kind of news quietly or without consequences.
Nicole got the call within the hour and rang me before she had even fully processed it herself, her voice barely holding together. "Valerie. You have the deal. Lumière Étoile wants you as their spokesperson."
"Do not celebrate yet," I said. "Amara is not going to let this go without a fight. This is where it gets messy."
The news spread through the industry quickly. When it reached Caspian during a brief moment between meetings he called me immediately.
"You did well."
I laughed softly. "Being praised by you makes me happier than anything else."
"I will be waiting," he said, "for you to reach the top."
"I will." I meant every word of it.
Nicole and I arrived at Xova’s offices twenty minutes later. Liam had called me in and I had come with backup this time. We walked down the corridor toward his office and I could hear voices through the door before we even reached it. I recognized them both immediately.
I stopped. Nicole looked at me. I held up one finger and she understood.
I stood outside the door and listened.
Amara’s voice first, sharp and controlled underneath the performance of grief. "Liam. How could you let Valerie take my deal? You know who Marcel Fontaine is. His sister sits on the judging panel of the Top Ten Model Awards. This deal was everything. And you just handed it to her." A pause, then her voice cracking precisely on cue. "She already stole you. Now she has to take everything else too? If I lose this deal I do not want this child. I will not stay at Xova."
"Do not speak like that —"
"The baby, Liam. Think about the baby."
I heard him fumble. Heard the shift in his voice when he was searching for the version of a situation that worked best for him. "Honestly, Valerie has always given ground before. She has stepped back a dozen times. She is about to marry me anyway. What does she need a spokesperson deal for?"
"Then go tell her that," Amara said. Her voice had gone quiet and satisfied in the way it did when she already knew the outcome. "You will see. She will give in. She always does."
I stood in that corridor and let those words land. She always does. Five years of my life summarized in three words by a woman sitting in a wheelchair she had put herself in.
I looked at Nicole. Nicole looked at me. She was holding her notebook against her chest and her jaw was tight.
I pushed open the door and walked in.
Liam looked up. Amara arranged herself immediately into a picture of wronged vulnerability, shoulders dropping, eyes going soft and wounded. She was good at it. She had been practicing on me for years.
"Where did you disappear to last night?" Liam asked the moment I walked in, like that was the most pressing issue in the room.
I glanced at him, then at Amara, then back at him. "It is all just a misunderstanding between you and Amara," he continued before I could respond. "I have already released a clarification. Do not make a big deal of it."
I let a beat of silence pass. "The situation between Miss Amara and me is not a misunderstanding. I helped her more times than I can count. She turned around and used every single one of those times against me the first chance she got. Am I really that easy to push around?"
"Valerie, Amara was worried about the reporters. She had no choice."
"Is that right." I did not make it a question.
"Regardless, it is over." His voice shifted into the tone he used when he had already decided something and was informing me of it. "As for the deal, return it to Amara. This contract matters enormously to her. You have not done a shoot in years. You are not going to be comfortable in this industry anymore. What do you need a spokesperson deal for?" He said it the way he always said things to me, like he was a superior correcting someone below him who did not fully understand their own situation. "Give it back."
"Exactly," Amara added from her wheelchair, her voice sweet and reasonable. "The deal was originally mine. They only approached you because they thought I could not recover in time. You would not want to be a substitute again, would you Valerie?"
"That word sounds rather ironic coming from you, Miss Amara," I said.
Liam’s eyes snapped to mine. "Valerie. If you still love me, if you care about this company’s future, you will not take this deal. We need Amara to win this award. It matters to all of us."
He used love. He had always known it was the word that could make me yield and he reached for it without hesitation, the way someone reaches for a tool they have used so many times they no longer even think about it. Amara watched from her wheelchair with satisfaction already forming behind her eyes.
I let him finish.
"The deal," I said simply. "I have already accepted it."
He stared at me. "Valerie —"
"I am also a model under contract at Xova Entertainment."
Amara’s expression flickered. Just once. Just enough for me to see that she had not actually expected this.
Good
"I have already spoken with Mr. Fontaine personally." I continued. "He is looking forward to our collaboration." I held his gaze and did not move. "Was there anything else?"
I looked at Liam’s face one last time and felt something settle inside me that had been restless for a very long time.
The truth was I had genuinely considered letting it go. There was a version of this where I walked away, took the spokesperson deal, rebuilt my career quietly and let Liam and Amara have each other and the mess they had made together. I had thought about it seriously. I am not someone who enjoys war. I never was. I wanted peace. I wanted to model and work and go home to someone who actually saw me and just live my life without all of this.
But Liam had made that impossible.
Every time I had given ground he had taken more. Every time I had been reasonable he had mistaken it for weakness. Every time I had swallowed my anger and shown up and done what was asked of me he had looked at Amara and laughed about how easy I was to manage. Five years. Five years of being managed.
And now he was sitting across from me using the word love like a crowbar trying to pry something loose that no longer belonged to him.
He was too far gone. There was nothing left in him worth saving and I was done looking for it.
What Liam did not know, what Amara did not know, what nobody in that room understood yet, was that the revenge had already started. It had started the morning I walked out of a marriage registry with a certificate in my hands and a plan already forming. Every move I had made since then, the shoot, the Instagram live, the hospital visit, the spokesperson deal, none of it had been reactive. All of it had been deliberate. All of it had been the opening moves of something much larger than any of them had the imagination to see coming.
Xova Entertainment was Liam’s whole world. He had built it on my back and my silence and my willingness to disappear whenever it was convenient for him. He thought it was solid. He thought it was untouchable.
He had no idea I was already inside the walls.
I was going to take Xova down to the ground. Not quickly. Not messily. Brick by brick, deal by deal, until there was nothing left standing that he could point to and call his. And I was going to make him watch every single piece of it fall.
Five years, Liam.
Every one of them is going to cost you.
