Rain Chen's Point of View
Funny thing about lies.
They never stay buried.
Even when you bury them in velvet mansions and perfume-scented love letters.
I never needed to come back.
Not really.
Sky Maddox was supposed to break without me.
She was supposed to need me like oxygen.
Instead, she fucking flourished.
Richer than I ever was. Glowing. Laughing. Goddamn France.
And the son?
The son is a mirror.
A goddamn carbon copy of who I was at eighteen—too pretty, too tall, too cruel.
Except there's something more calculated in Sebastian Maddox.
Something I recognize too well.
I saw it the first night I followed him.
---
He thought he was slick.
Sneaking out after she'd fallen asleep with a romance novel in her lap, French wine half-finished, lip-gloss kiss still fresh on the rim. So blindly in love with her boy. Still believed he was the same clingy baby who cried when she left for college classes.
She doesn't know her son kisses strangers in the alley behind the club.
That he uses fake names, fake IDs, fake smiles.
That he palms vodka like water and pulls girls onto his lap like he owns the fucking world.
She doesn't see what I see.
I lean against the blacked-out window of my car and light a cigarette.
He's got some girl—what's her name? Demi?—on a leash.
Red lips, legs for days, clinging to him like a prayer.
He doesn't even look at her when he walks away.
Cold. Calculated. Careless.
Just. Like. Me.
---
I watch him swagger out of the club like he owns it.
Leather jacket. Bike keys twirling around his fingers.
Blood still hot from the kiss he won't remember.
And I hate him.
Because for all the women I destroyed and walked away from…
Sky was the one I didn't mean to lose.
I thought she'd fall apart.
Instead, she built a goddamn empire. Raised that boy alone.
Spoils him. Coddles him. Thinks the sun rises and sets on his head.
But now?
Now I get to be the one who tells her the truth.
I get to shatter her.
And when I do—
when I rip the baby-pink blindfold off and show her who her golden boy really is—
she'll come back to me.
Bleeding. Crying. Crushed.
Exactly how I like her.
---
Because Sky was never built for power.
She was built for me.
To kiss me when I'm cruel.
To cry when I leave.
To beg when I return.
Sebastian has no idea how easy he's making this.
He's doing my work for me.
He's already breaking her heart.
He just doesn't know it yet.
But I do.
I blow a stream of smoke into the night sky and smile, wicked and slow.
"Like father, like son," I mutter.
Then I crush the cigarette under my heel, watch the embers die, and whisper the promise:
She was always mine.
And soon?
She'll remember that.