Chapter 180: What I Feel

ADRIEN’S POV

The leather seat of the private jet is soft, far too soft, sucking me into a plush cushion that feels completely wrong against my stiff, aching spine.

Outside the small oval window, the clouds stretch out below us like a thick blanket of dirty gray cotton, endless and dull under the pale sunlight.

It’s nauseatingly aesthetic.

We are flying back to the United States, back to Orion’s stupidly massive estate, leaving behind a mess I can’t even begin to think about with Lady Dimitra, Leon’s bloodied face, and the quiet ruins of everything I thought I knew.

I keep my hands flat against my lap. My knees touch. My feet rest flat against the carpeted floor of the cabin. I refuse to wear shoes.

I stare blankly at the dark, reflective screen of my phone resting on the small fold-out table in front of me, watching my own pale, distorted shadow staring back at me in the glass.

On the surface, I am calm. I am going with the flow. I sit where I am supposed to sit, I board the plane when I am told to board, I act when an act is expected, and I sleep in the bed of the powerful man who put a ring on my finger.

I am doing what I have always done to survive, arranging every single detail into neat, tidy boxes inside my head, and stacking them away into the back of my mind so I do not crash.

Inside, every single nerve under my skin is burning with a fierce, suffocating fire.

I am feeling everything, all at once, and it feels like a heavy physical weight pressing down on my chest until I can barely draw air into my lungs.

My mind wanders back, drifting slowly down the halls of my own memory, opening doors I usually keep tightly locked and chained.

I think about my childhood. I think about the exact moment my life split in half and fell into darkness.

My biological mother died of leukemia. I was very young back then, barely old enough to understand the full weight of mortality, but the sheer horror of those final weeks is burned into my chest forever.

I remember the suffocating, chemical smell of antiseptic that clung to every corner of her hospital room.

I remember the pale, translucent gray shade of her skin, her thin, trembling fingers, and how quiet and hollow the world felt while her life slowly faded away.

What broke me back then was the sheer, crushing hopelessness. I was just a terrified child, sitting on a hard chair by her bed, watching her struggle to draw every single breath.

I called my father. I called him again and again until my fingers were trembling and my throat was raw from crying into the receiver. I begged him to come.

I screamed into the phone, pleading with him to leave his meetings, to leave his office and whatever was keeping him away, to come and hold my mother’s hand before she disappeared forever.

He never came.

He let the phone ring out, or he had his secretary make dry, empty excuses about pressing business matters and untouchable schedules.

I sat in that sterile room we turned into a hospital room completely alone, listening to the agonizingly slow double-beeps of the heart monitor, clutching my mother’s limp, freezing hand while she drifted in and out of consciousness.

She kept looking toward the door, her faded eyes searching for the man who had promised to love her, but the door stayed closed.

My father did not set foot in that room until my mother had already drawn her very last breath and her heart had gone completely still.

He walked in only after she was dead, looking immaculate in his tailored suit, bringing a brief, hypocritical sigh into the silence of the room.

And then, before her body was even cold, before the dirt had even settled over her grave in the damp earth, my father brought Alice and Louise into our home.

Alice did not enter our life suddenly like a chaotic storm. She entered like a creeping shadow, slipping quietly into every room, every conversation, every single space until there was no room left for anyone else, least of all me.

She always wore those damned black dresses— crisp, tailored, high-necked black silk that clung to her rigid frame.

Her dark hair was always pulled back into a tight, flawless bun, not a single strand ever straying out of place. Or she let it down when she needed others to notice her looks.

She smiled at my father with her cold, calculating eyes, and my father looked at her like a starving man offered a feast, eager to replace the memory of his dead wife as quickly as humanly possible.

I remember standing near the desk in the hallway back when my mother was still fighting for her life in those final weeks, long before Alice officially moved in, watching my father sit back while speaking with who I will later come to know as Alice.

"Henri, darling, you are exhausting yourself," I remember hearing her say over the crackling of the speaker. "You cannot save a woman whose body is already giving up. You have an empire to build. You have Louise and me to think about. Do not throw your entire life away for a lost cause."

And my father had swallowed her words whole.

Bit by bit, he had drawn his attention completely away from my mother, leaving me alone to watch her die. And once she was gone, Alice and her daughter Louise moved into the main house, claiming my mother’s rooms, taking over her gardens, and pushing me further and further into the background until I felt completely erased.

Alice made me feel less of myself every single day. She chipped away at my self-worth until I was convinced I was the most pathetic, useless thing to ever draw breath.

"Look at you, Adrien," her voice echoes in my memory, cold, sharp, and dripping with polite disappointment. "You have your mother’s weak heart and her foolish mind. You are soft. You are fragile. You are nothing."