Chapter 200 - 0200: Till Death Do Us Part

Chapter 200: Chapter 0200: Till Death Do Us Part

Graham’s Point of View

The heavy oak door to my office swung open with a violent, sharp creak, the sound grating against my raw, exposed nerves like rusty nails on a chalkboard. Even that small intrusion felt like an assault, another reminder that the world refused to leave me alone with my ruin.

I wanted silence. I wanted darkness. I wanted to be left alone with the wreckage of everything I had built, everything that was slipping through my fingers no matter how tightly I tried to hold on.

I didn’t turn around. I couldn’t bring myself to care who was stepping over the threshold. My entire world had narrowed to the pile of shredded white paper at my feet... confetti-like strips scattered across the dark hardwood floor, the ruined remnants of a life I refused to let go of.

I had read those papers a hundred times before I destroyed them, memorizing every clause, every cruel line of legal language that reduced five years of marriage to a formality. Tearing them apart hadn’t made the words disappear. It had only made the rage feel more real, more alive, as though the paper itself had been mocking me with every syllable of legal detachment.

"Graham, what the hell is wrong with you?!"

Lilian’s voice sliced through the heavy, suffocating air of the room... high-pitched, sharp, shrill, the exact kind of sound that made my back teeth ache with irritation.

I didn’t look at her. I didn’t acknowledge her presence. I just stood there, towering over the destruction, my hands flexed tightly at my sides. Blood dripped steadily from my split, open knuckles, pattering rhythmically onto the carpet, my chest heaving in short, violent, uneven gasps.

I welcomed the sting of broken skin. It was the only sensation sharp enough to cut through the numbness spreading through my body like frost, the only proof I still had left that I could feel anything at all.

Lilian stepped further into the room, one hand resting heavily over her swollen belly, where my child was growing. Her eyes widened in shock as her gaze swept over the nightmare of the office: the shattered floor-to-ceiling mirror, the overturned mahogany furniture, the broken picture frames, the fallen bookshelves, the crimson blood pooling beneath my fingers.

For a moment, something like fear flickered across her face, quickly buried beneath a mask of furious concern. She had seen me angry before. She had never seen me like this.

"Graham!" she snapped, her tone dripping with rising panic. "Look at me when I’m talking to you! What did you do?"

I didn’t move an inch. I didn’t give a damn.

Behind my burning eyes, the only image flashing on repeat was Elena’s face... her breathtaking smile, the way her soft, warm hand used to feel tucked inside mine, the way she used to look at me as if I were her entire universe. And then the cold, calculated way she had packed her bags, hired a shark of an attorney, and walked away from our home as if fifteen years meant absolutely nothing to her.

The betrayal sat in my chest like a stone, heavy and immovable, crowding out every other thought, every other person, including the woman standing a few feet away with my unborn child beneath her hand. I knew that was wrong. I knew it with a clarity that should have shamed me into stopping. It didn’t.

"Graham!" Lilian’s voice spiked, turning shrill as she planted her free hand on her hip, her face contorting into a mask of rage and mounting terror. "You’re bleeding all over the floor! Look at your hands! What happened in here? Have you completely lost your mind?"

I ignored her completely, my bloodshot eyes staying locked on the shredded divorce documents beneath my boots. My brain was a battlefield, a chaotic hurricane of possessive fury, denial, and unyielding determination. Somewhere beneath the noise, a small, distant part of me recognized how far I had fallen, how unrecognizable I had become even to myself.

That part of me was easy to silence. It always was, these days. I had grown skilled at drowning it out, burying it beneath the louder, hungrier voice that refused to accept the word *divorce* as anything final.

Lilian could stand there and scream until she choked. It meant nothing to me. Nothing in this world mattered except one undeniable truth: Elena was my wife. She was mine. And I would burn my life to the ground before I let another human being take her away from me, even if that life included the woman carrying my unborn child, even if burning it meant losing every shred of decency I had left.

Lilian took a hesitant step closer, reaching out with a trembling hand, as if she thought she could touch me, calm me, comfort me, as if she had any right to invade my space.

"Graham, please... talk to me," she begged, her shrill edge softening into desperate confusion. "What is going on with you? Why are you doing this to yourself?"

I finally turned my head, my neck muscles straining as I slowly locked my cold, deadened gaze onto hers. My expression was an icy, unyielding wall of hostility, and some distant part of me registered the way she flinched, as though she were looking at a stranger wearing my face.

"Get out," I said, the words dragging out of my throat like gravel.

Lilian’s eyes widened in disbelief. Her hand instinctively dropped back to her stomach, fingers curling tight and protective over the swell of her belly. "Excuse me?"

"You heard me," I growled, my tone dropping into a low, dangerous frequency. "Get. Out. Of. My. Office."

She flinched violently, as though the sharp edge of my voice had physically struck her across the face. Her lips parted in shock before her jaw set into a bitter, defensive line, some stubborn resolve hardening behind her eyes.

"I am not going anywhere until you tell me what the hell is happening!" she yelled, her eyes shining with unshed tears of anger and fear. "You’ve been locked inside this dark room for days, Graham! You aren’t eating, you aren’t sleeping, you’re smashing the house to pieces! You are scaring me!"

A bitter, harsh bark of laughter tore out of my chest, utterly humorless.

"You’re scared?" I spat, taking a heavy, menacing step toward her, my bloody hand clenching into a fist. "Good. Maybe now you’ll get a tiny taste of what real terror feels like."

Lilian’s face drained of color. She backed away half a step, pressing her hand harder into her stomach as though she could shield the child inside her from the venom in my voice. "What is that supposed to mean? How can you say something like that to me?"

"It means I don’t have the time or the patience for your drama right now, Lilian!" I snapped, my voice cracking like a whip against the dark walls. "It means I am dealing with real, catastrophic problems. Real issues that have nothing to do with you!"

She recoiled as if I’d delivered a physical blow to her chest, her eyes flashing with humiliation and anger, the betrayal in her expression unmistakable even through the dim light.

"I am carrying your child, Graham!" she hissed through her teeth, her entire frame trembling with indignation. "Your baby! Or did your twisted, broken brain completely forget that small detail while you were in here throwing a temper tantrum?"

I turned my back on her, staring down at the ruined floor, my jaw clenching until my teeth throbbed. Somewhere in the recesses of my conscience, I knew she deserved better than this... better than a man who looked straight through her as though she were made of glass.

The knowledge changed nothing.

"No," I said coldly. "I haven’t forgotten. But right now? I don’t give a single fuck."

The cruel words hung suspended in the heavy air between us. I heard the exact moment they landed... the sharp hitch of her breath, the tense, rigid posture of her shoulders, the painful silence that followed, thick enough to choke on.

I didn’t care. I couldn’t bring myself to feel a shred of guilt, not when Elena was slipping through my fingers with every second ticking by on the wall.

"You are unbelievable," Lilian spat, her voice quivering with hatred and heartbreak. "I am standing right here in front of you, Graham! I’m in this house! I’m trying to help you, I’m trying to be here for you, and you are treating me like I don’t even exist!"

"Because right now, you DON’T!" I shot back, spinning on my heel to roar directly into her face, my dark eyes wild with unhinged possessiveness. "Not when she...!"

I choked the sentence back, my bloody fingers digging so hard into my palms that new streaks of red ran down my wrist.

Not when she left me. Not when she signed those papers. Not when my whole world is walking out the door.

Lilian’s furious expression shifted, her sharp posture relaxing into something hollow, sorrowful, and deeply bitter. She looked at the torn papers on the floor, then back up at my manic, bloodshot eyes, and something in her face seemed to crumble, as if she had finally understood a truth she had been avoiding for months, a truth she had perhaps always known but refused to say aloud.

"This is about Elena... isn’t it?" she asked softly, her voice flattening into a painful realization. "It’s always been about her."

I didn’t answer. I didn’t need to. The destructive evidence scattered across the room gave her all the answers she would ever need.

My gaze flicked away from her pale face, returning to the shredded pile of divorce documents resting near the shredder. A dark, sharp idea ignited inside my mind, cutting through the foggy storm of my rage with terrifying precision. I slowly crouched down on one knee, my long fingers brushing against the cold, thin paper strips on the floor.

My heart pounded an erratic, frantic beat against my ribs, equal parts dread and exhilaration, as though some reckless, long-caged version of myself had finally been set loose.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone. The screen illuminated the darkness of the room, reflecting off the blood on my knuckles like a grim halo. I opened the camera app. Without a word to the woman weeping behind me, I raised the phone and snapped a clear, high-resolution photo of the shredded divorce papers, the flash blindingly bright in the dim room, capturing the absolute destruction of her legal notice.

Lilian stared at me, her brow furrowing in confusion, her voice hesitant and small. "Graham... what are you doing? Who are you taking pictures of that for?"

I ignored her completely. I didn’t owe her an explanation. She didn’t matter, not in this moment... nothing mattered except the woman who thought she could erase my name from her life.

I unlocked my phone and navigated to an untraceable burner app, pulling up a fresh, private number - a line she had never seen, one she couldn’t block before reading the message. I attached the photograph of her shredded divorce papers to the text draft.

My thumbs hovered over the glass keyboard, my heart thrashing against my sternum, my entire soul narrowing to one obsessive objective: I would make sure she remembered exactly who she belonged to, no matter what it cost either of us.

Lilian took another frantic step closer, her hand reaching toward my shoulder, her voice cracking with desperation. "Graham, please! Talk to me! Stop staring at your phone! What are you doing?"

My thumbs moved over the screen in a rapid, ruthless blur, typing out the declaration, the vow, the threat, letter by painful letter: I’m never divorcing you.

My breath hitched in my throat. I didn’t pause. I typed the next line: You’re my wife, Elena.

My bloody thumb hesitated for a fraction of a second before I added the cold, unyielding truth burned into my soul: Till. Death. Do. Us. Part.

I stared at the glowing text, feeling the dark weight of the words settle over me like iron chains. I added the final four, meant to strike directly into her chest, a reminder of the promises she had made to me at the altar: Never forget that.

I slammed my thumb down on the send button. The notification chime sounded, and the message vanished into the digital void, delivered straight to her phone. The screen fell dark again, and for a moment, the room felt unbearably still, as though even the walls were holding their breath, waiting to see what I would become next.

The heavy, suffocating weight of what I had just done lingered in the silence, like a boulder plunging into a quiet pool of water, sending ripples through every corner of the room that would never fully settle.

Lilian stared at my cold, emotionless face, her eyes filled with horror, disgust, and disbelief as she registered what I had sent.

"Graham, no..." she whispered, her voice trembling violently. "You can’t... you can’t keep doing this..."

"I can," I cut her off instantly, my voice dropping into an icy, smooth tone of absolute finality, my eyes fixed on the dark phone screen. "And I just did."

Lilian reached out blindly, grabbing onto the sleeve of my torn shirt, her voice rising into a frantic, desperate plea. "Graham, stop! Look at yourself! You are making a huge mistake!"

I ripped my arm out of her grip with such force that she stumbled back against the wall, my voice dropping into a low, dangerous snarl that vibrated through the floorboards. "The only mistake I made was letting her leave. And I’m fixing it."

Her fingers flexed helplessly in the air before she pressed her hand back over her stomach, nails digging through her dress into her skin as tears spilled over her cheeks. In that moment, she looked smaller than I had ever seen her, as though the man she married had vanished entirely, replaced by someone she no longer recognized and could no longer reach.

I saw that transformation reflected in her eyes, and some buried fragment of the man I used to be mourned it. The rest of me didn’t care.

"You’re obsessed!" she shrieked, her voice breaking completely. "This isn’t love, Graham! This isn’t healthy! You are out of your mind! You cannot force a woman to stay with you when she doesn’t want you!"

I turned slowly to face her, my expression void of human emotion, my voice striking through the quiet like a whip-crack of absolute finality.

"Watch me."