Chapter 189: I Hate How You’re Walking…

ADRIEN’S POV

The rain on the sedan windows blurs the city streets into long, distorted streaks of grey and red light.

Inside the car, the air is quiet and stiflingly heavy, smelling of cold leather and stale air conditioning. It’s nauseating.

The low hum of the engine vibrates continuously through the floor, traveling up through the soles of my shoes and settling into the small of my back like an ache that refuses to fade.

I keep my eyes locked on the digital screen resting in my lap.

The tablet glows with lines of encrypted text, media traffic monitors, and financial logs.

The numbers keep refreshing, scrolling upward with every minute that passes, but my mind is no longer merely tracking the data. It is drowning in it.

Every time I swipe my thumb across the smooth glass surface, a fresh wave of nausea hits the back of my throat.

When the hotel video first hit the internet after my date with Orion, I thought of it as a personal blow. I framed it in the simple, bitter terms of the world I used to know.

I thought of it as Louise being Louise— is it really surprising to know that I already knew it was her?— throwing one more spiteful punch at my face from behind a curtain to make sure I remembered my place.

I thought she just wanted to humiliate me, to strip away whatever tiny shred of dignity I had rebuilt, and to make the public point fingers at the disgraced boy standing in the shadow of Orion Vassilis.

I was wrong. I was so naively, foolishly wrong.

This is no longer just a personal grudge between two damaged people who grew up under the same roof.

Louise did not simply throw dirt at my name to make me cry and lock myself into a room. She aimed a weapon directly at the entire Vassilis family, and she pulled the trigger without caring who caught the stray bullet.

By standing beside Orion, by wearing his wedding ring on my finger, my name has become bound to him and his family. Attacking me in the press means attacking Orion’s standing, his family’s political authority, and the delicate, dangerous balances holding their business ties together.

In their world, a public insult is not something you ignore or quietly endure until the news cycle turns. A public insult is a bloodstain on a white floor. If a family as powerful as the Vassilis name allows a scandal like this to hang in the air without a swift, brutal answer, it makes them look soft.

It tells their rivals, their partners, and the factions waiting in the dark that their foundation is cracking.

Even Lady Dimitra could not ignore this. Whatever she privately thinks of me, whatever disgust she feels toward my presence in her nephew’s life, allowing this attack to continue without a response makes the whole family appear weak.

I stare at the screen until the glowing text turns into a blurred smear of white light. A deep, unsettling uneasiness settles over my chest, heavy and suffocating, like breathing in wet dust.

I feel as though I am standing right at the edge of a massive precipice.

It is a terrifyingly sharp sensation, a quiet gut feeling that the ground beneath my feet has already eroded and that the world I knew— the world where I was simply a victim trying to survive his past— is crumbling away into nothingness.

Something is changing. Something fundamental and irreversible is shifting in the air, pulling me toward a threshold I never asked to cross.

It feels like walking blindfolded down a narrow corridor toward a door you cannot see, knowing that once you step through, you can never go back to the person you were before you entered.

I can never go back to the person I once thought I was.

My fingers tremble slightly against the edge of the tablet. I press my back deeper into the leather seat, forcing my breath to come slow and steady, but the knot in my gut only grows tighter.

"You are reading the same thing over and over, Adrien," Orion says softly from the seat beside me.

His voice is calm, perfectly smooth, and completely unbothered by the swaying motion of the car or the storm building around us.

He sits with his long legs crossed, his soulless black eyes turned toward the glass window, watching the rain streaked buildings pass by like ghosts in the fog.

"I am trying to see how she pulled this off," I say, my voice raspy and dry. I clear my throat, my thumb hovering over a column of bank logs. "Louise is bitter, Orion. She is spiteful. But she doesn’t know how to set up offshore routing servers. She doesn’t have the contacts to bribe top-tier media editors in three different time zones at the exact same moment."

"She didn’t work alone, darling," Orion replies quietly. He turns his head slowly, his dark pupils catching the dim, blue light inside the car. "She provided the raw material. Someone else built the engine to spread it, and chose the exact moment to strike."

"And you think Lady Dimitra’s people are feeding the flames?" I ask, my jaw tightening until my teeth ache.

Orion lets out a low, slow breath that barely makes a sound. "My aunt is sharp when she senses an advantage. Even if she didn’t help Louise release the video, she is quietly encouraging the press behind closed doors."

"Allowing a scandal around you to circulate gives her leverage to question my judgment. It gives her room to challenge my decisions concerning the family."

I look back down at the tablet, a wave of bitter frustration washing over me.

I hate this. I hate the way every single piece of my pain is reduced to political leverage on a board I never wanted to play on.

I hate that my trauma, my family’s dirtiness, and my half-sister’s hatred are all being used as fuel to unknowingly power a war between Orion and his aunt.

I hate that Louise is walking a path she doesn’t even know has been set out for her.