Chapter 180 - One Hundred-Eighty: Damage

//CLARA//

A guardian marrying his ward. An orphan. A man taking advantage of a girl in his care.

My thumbs dug into the coarse paper of The New York Tribune until the dry ink smudged gray across my skin. A sickening, icy wave rolled up from my stomach, making my knees go soft.

To the hypocritical ghouls reading the morning edition over their porcelain teacups, I wasn’t an ambitious survivor using every tool at my disposal.

I was just a naive, helpless girl. An orphan plucked from obscurity, isolated in a grand Hudson estate, and systematically compromised by the ruthless tycoon appointed to protect her.

"Clara."

Casimir’s voice was barely a whisper, but it sounded like a crack of thunder in the quiet room.

I couldn’t look up. My eyes were locked on those words. An orphan. A girl in his care. A dry, ragged breath hitched in my throat.

"Look at me," Casimir commanded softly.

His hand gently pried my white-knuckled grip off the edge of the newspaper. He pulled the sheet away and tossed it onto the desk, his dark eyes locking onto mine.

His face was hard as granite, bloodshot and bruised with exhaustion, but beneath it burned a terrifying, stubborn arrogance.

"We are done hiding in this room," Casimir said. "I am going out there. I am going to stand on the front steps, and I am going to announce to every press hound in this state that you are legally my wife."

My heart stopped. "What?"

"If they want a scandal, I will give them an undeniable fact," Casimir growled, his jaw flexing. "I will claim you as Mrs. Guggenheim before the entire city. Let Bartholomew try to drag my name through the mud when my ring is on your finger."

"Are you insane?!" The shock snapped me right out of my spiral, my survival instincts roaring to life. "Casimir, that is suicide! You can’t just throw a secret marriage in their faces out of spite!"

"I will not be put on the defensive by a broken Vanderbilt—"

"This isn’t about your pride!" I stepped right into his space, my eyes flashing with desperate, calculated rage. "If you march out there like a conqueror and demand they accept a guardian marrying his ward, you confirm every single bias they have! You look like a tyrant who thinks he’s above the law!"

Casimir narrowed his eyes, his broad frame towering over me. "I am the law on this estate."

"Not to the entirety of New York, you’re not! Not to your railroad board!" I pressed my hands against his chest, feeling the rigid tension in his muscles. "Listen to me! You want to make the announcement? Fine. But we do not play it your way. We do not bully the press. We control them."

My modern PR brain took the wheel. If Casimir was determined to trigger this bomb, I had to be the one to direct the blast radius.

"If you announce this as a brazen power move, we lose everything," I said sharply. "We have to frame it using the one leverage Bartholomew was trying to hide. My dowry."

Casimir’s dark eyes sharpened slightly.

"I am not a penniless orphan," I continued, the words spitting out like venom.

"Bartholomew didn’t chase me because of some tragic romance. He chased me because his family estates are bleeding money, and my massive inheritance was the only thing standing between him and bankruptcy! We announce our marriage, but we expose Bartholomew as a fortune-hunting fraud who staged a beat-up routine because I jilted him and took my fortune out of his reaching hands!"

Casimir stared down at me, the dark gears turning behind his eyes as he absorbed my strategy.

"A calculated economic execution. Expose his motives before he can frame yours."

"It’s the only way to minimize the fallout," I spat, my mind racing through every damage-control protocol I knew. "We destroy his credibility by proving he was after my estate. We rebrand before they can print another word."

It was a desperate, high-stakes gamble, but I took it anyway.

Casimir’s hand came up, catching the back of my neck in a firm grip.

"Then we do it your way, little bird. But we do it now." He raised his voice, barking toward the hallway. "Higgins!"

The door swung open instantly. "Sir?"

"Assemble the reporters at the front gates," Casimir ordered. "I will be making a statement on the front steps in twenty minutes."

Before stepping out to face the mob, I needed to wash the stale ink and sweat from my face. I left the study and walked down the long, carpeted corridor toward my chambers.

My mind was spinning at a million miles an hour. Drafting the headlines, calculating press responses, trying to anticipate every predatory question the journalists would throw at us.

My head pounded so fiercely that my surroundings felt muted and blurry.

As I rounded the corner near the linen alcove, low, hurried whispers broke through the fog in my brain. Two housemaids were huddled near the velvet drapes, feather dusters clutched in their hands, their heads bent together.

"—saw the paper myself," one murmured with salacious satisfaction. "Poor Mr. Vanderbilt, bruised to a pulp—"

"—and who’s to say he didn’t force her?" the second whispered back, casting a glance down the hall. "Or maybe she lured him into her bed—"

I froze, the air leaving my lungs. The humiliation struck me down in half. In my modern career, I would have shredded them with a single look, but right now, my mind was too fried, too shaken to summon a word. I stood glued to the floor, staring at them like a phantom.

A heavy footstep echoed behind me.

Before the maids could even turn, Casimir’s towering shadow washed over the hallway. He materialized like a storm as he caught the tail end of their hushed chatter.

I couldn’t move, but Casimir stepped past me.

"Pack your trunks."

The two maids gasped, dropping their dusters, their faces instantly draining of all color.

"M-Master Guggenheim—"

"You have five minutes to leave this estate," Casimir continued, staring down at them with detachment. "If I see either of your faces on my property when the clock strikes nine, I will ensure you are blacklisted from every domestic service register from here to Boston. You will not find work sweeping a barn."

"Please, sir! We meant no harm—"

"Higgins!" Casimir barked without breaking eye contact.

Higgins appeared from down the gallery as if he had been waiting for the cue. "Sir?"

"Escort them to the gates immediately. Pay them through the end of the hour, and throw their belongings out behind them."

"Right away, sir." Higgins gestured sternly toward the servants’ stairwell, forcing the sobbing maids to scurry away like frightened mice.

Casimir didn’t watch them leave. He turned to me, reaching out to firmly grasp my wrist, pulling me out of the hallway before I could sink any deeper into my own head.

"Do not waste your thoughts on the vermin in this house," he murmured, his thumb rubbing over my pulse point. "Focus on the wolves waiting outside."

An hour later, the echoes of the press frenzy were still ringing in my ears.

We had done it. We stood side-by-side on the marble terrace, bathed in the harsh, blinding flashes of magnesium powder. Casimir had delivered the icy announcement, and I had executed my script with flawless, sociopathic precision.

Standing in the grand parlor as the doors finally shut the press out, I let out a long, ragged breath, smoothing down the silk of my dress.

Then Higgins re-entered the room, holding a fresh telegram in his white-gloved hand.

"Mr. Guggenheim," Higgins said softly. "A wire from the Board of Directors in Manhattan."

Casimir snapped the paper open. I stepped closer, watching his face, expecting to see the tide turn in our favor.

Instead, Casimir’s jaw went completely slack. The color drained from his lips.

"They’re pulling the stock," Casimir whispered.

My stomach dropped into a bottomless pit. "What?"

"The Board thinks I married my ward to seize control of her wealth for my own railways."

A cold, agonizing terror gripped my chest. My brilliant, media-trained strategy had completely backfired. This gilded society was even more cynical than I was.

My strategy. My carefully curated narrative.

"I did this," I whispered. "I—"

"No." Casimir’s voice was sharp. "They were always going to find a reason. If it wasn’t this, it would have been something else."

By trying to control the flame, I had just handed our enemies the exact narrative they needed to ruin him.

No.

No, no, no.

This can’t be happening. I did everything right. I said everything right. I controlled the narrative.

Why—