Betrayed By My Fiancé, I Married His Most Powerful Enemy

Chapter 8: Fake tears

At two in the afternoon I sat in the small side office Liam had assigned me at Xova, the one nobody used, it was dusty but it would do for now.

I had convinced Liam to let me handle it from here. I told him I performed better without an audience watching me from across the room, that the pressure of him standing there would make me look nervous and unconvincing. He had agreed without much argument because ultimately Liam only cared about the result.

What he did not know was that I could not look at his face while I did this. Not because I felt guilty. Because I was afraid I would smile.

I opened Instagram on my phone, checked my appearance once in the front camera, smoothed my plain white blouse and went live.

The viewers flooded in within seconds. Within a minute there were forty thousand people watching. Within three there were over a hundred thousand. The comments were moving too fast to read individually but I could feel the temperature of them, sharp and hostile and hungry.

Liam joined the live from his office immediately, his face appearing in the corner of the screen looking appropriately grave and supportive. Several verified press accounts joined as co-hosts. The questions started before I had even opened my mouth.

"Valerie why did you go behind Xova’s back and show up at a shoot you were not invited to?"

"Are you jealous of Amara? Is that what this is really about?"

"Your name has been trending for days. Did you pay for that? Is this all manufactured attention?"

"You disappeared for five years and now you pull a stunt like this. What exactly are you trying to prove?"

"Amara built herself up from nothing and you tried to steal her moment. How do you sleep at night?"

"Your manager released false information about you substituting for Amara multiple times. Are you that desperate for relevance that you would fabricate an entire history?"

I let the questions come. I sat quietly and let them pile up until the room felt sufficiently full of fire. Then I took a breath that was just shaky enough to be visible on camera and looked directly into the lens.

"I want to start by apologizing," I said, and I let my voice carry the exact right weight of someone who had been carrying something heavy for a long time. "Not because anyone told me to. But because I genuinely believe it is the right thing to do. Amara was sick and injured and I did not want the company to lose money. I thought I was doing the right thing. I am sorry " I paused and looked down briefly, the gesture of someone gathering themselves. "five years ago I stepped away from modeling. It was my choice and I do not regret it. But coming back the way I did, the way I chose to reenter this space, was wrong. It was selfish and it was reckless and I am sorry."

The comments shifted slightly. A small current of sympathy moving through the hostility.

"Amara has worked incredibly hard for everything she has," I continued, my voice catching just slightly on her name in a way that sounded like admiration and cost me absolutely nothing. "She did not deserve to have her spotlight taken from her by someone who should have known better. I made the decision to appear at that shoot on my own. My company did not know. Amara did not know. My manager did not know. Everything that happened is entirely my fault and I take full responsibility for every bit of it."

I bowed my head toward the camera.

The live chat went quieter than it had been since I started. A hundred and sixty thousand people watching a woman take the blame for everything without flinching, without deflecting, without a single qualification. They had never seen that before. It confused them in the best possible way.

I thought it was over. I thought we were done.

But then Liam, watching from his corner of the screen, unmuted himself.

"I appreciate Valerie’s honesty today," he said warmly, performing concern for the camera with the ease of someone who had been doing it for years. "And I want to assure everyone that Xova stands behind its artists. However." He paused precisely long enough to let the word land. "This is not the first time Valerie has made decisions like this without the company’s knowledge. We have addressed similar situations privately in the past." He looked directly into his own camera with the expression of a disappointed but patient mentor. "We are giving her one final chance because we believe in second opportunities. Valerie, please learn from this."

Not the first time.

Four words. Perfectly placed. Designed to take every single thing Nicole had released and reframe it entirely. If this had happened before, if I had a pattern of going rogue and seeking attention on my own, then every photograph Nicole had published of me substituting for Amara became proof of my desperation rather than evidence of their exploitation.

Liam, you absolute snake.

I bowed my head again toward the camera, slow and contrite, and said nothing.

I did not defend myself.

Not yet.

The live ended. The comment sections filled with hostility almost immediately, rolling in fast and mean and thoroughly satisfied with themselves. I sat in that small office with the old coffee smell and watched my phone screen and felt nothing but a very specific and very focused kind of calm.

At exactly three seventeen, I texted Nicole, "make sure everything is ready, I will give you the signal once it is time. I still think Liam has something else in store"

...

Meanwhile Caspian was walking out of a board meeting on the forty second floor of Nastla’s Manhattan offices when he caught the tail end of a conversation between two of his junior staff in the corridor. They stopped talking the moment they saw him but not quite fast enough.

He looked at his assistant, Theo. "What happened?"

Theo pulled up the coverage on his tablet and summarized it in under a minute. Caspian listened without expression, took the tablet and watched thirty seconds of the live replay, then handed it back.

"Do we need to intervene?" Theo asked carefully.

Caspian was quiet for a moment, looking at nothing in particular with those steady unreadable eyes. "No," he said finally. "Not yet." He turned back toward his office. "I want to see how she handles it herself."

He had helped her twice already. He was not going to make a habit of catching her before she fell. That was not what she had asked for and it was not what she needed. What he needed to know, what he had been quietly wondering since the morning she walked out of that hotel room and back into the fire without hesitating, was exactly what kind of woman his wife was when nobody was standing beside her.

He suspected he already knew the answer.

He wanted to watch her prove it.