Chapter 246 - 0246: You’re Stuck WIth Me

Chapter 246: Chapter 0246: You’re Stuck WIth Me

Lillian’s Point Of View

"You’re a jinx, Lillian."

For a moment, I honestly thought I had misheard him. The word didn’t register properly. It just hung there in the air between us, wrong, ugly, like someone had dropped something rotten in the middle of the room. I waited for him to take it back, to laugh it off as some cruel joke gone too far, but he only watched me with an expression I couldn’t read. The clock on the far wall ticked on, indifferent, while my whole world seemed to tilt on its axis.

A jinx.

My body reacted before my mind caught up. I stumbled back a step, my heel catching the edge of the rug, and I almost lost my balance. My hand flew straight to my stomach, pressing instinctively against the gentle curve there as my breath caught hard in my throat. The baby. He had called me a jinx, and all I could think about was the baby... this small, fragile life I had already begun to love more than I understood was possible.

"What...?"

The sound that came out of my mouth barely counted as a word. I stared at Graham, at the man sitting behind the wide dark desk like he owned the entire room, like he owned me too. The man I had spent months believing I understood, whose late-night confessions and stolen touches had once felt like promises whispered only for me.

But the man in front of me now looked different. A stranger wearing a familiar face, his features arranged into something I had never seen directed at me before.

Not angry. Anger would have been easier to deal with. Anger meant he still cared enough to feel something. This was worse. This was nothing.

His face was flat. Controlled. Almost bored. Like this entire conversation had already drained every ounce of patience he was willing to give it, as though I were an item on a long list of tedious obligations he needed to clear before lunch. I searched his eyes for some flicker of the man who used to trace his fingers along my spine and murmur that I made him forget every hard thing about his life. I found nothing.

"Did you just call me..."

"A jinx?" he finished for me coolly. His lips curved slightly, but it wasn’t a smile. It was something thinner. Colder. A shape his mouth made out of habit rather than feeling. "Yes. That’s exactly what I said."

My chest tightened painfully. I just stared at him, waiting for him to laugh, waiting for him to say he didn’t mean it, that he was frustrated, that he had gone too far. Surely there was a version of this moment where he reached for my hand instead of my throat. But nothing like that happened. Instead he leaned back in his leather chair, fingers tapping lazily against the armrest, as if my unraveling were nothing more than mild background noise, a minor disturbance to be waited out.

"You heard me correctly," he said. "No need to pretend otherwise."

My throat burned. "Graham..." His name came out shaky, wounded, barely recognizable even to my own ears. "You’re joking," I said weakly, though even as I said it, some small, sinking part of me already knew better.

He raised one eyebrow. "Do I look like I’m joking?"

My mouth opened. Closed again. Because no. No, he didn’t look like he was joking at all. The silence stretched thick between us, heavy enough to choke on. I could hear my own heartbeat pounding in my ears, frantic and uneven. Then he spoke again, and this time his voice was sharper, cutting straight through me.

"You’re bad luck, Lillian."

Those words hit harder than the first ones. My stomach dropped, and for a moment the room seemed to tilt beneath my feet. I pressed my palm flat against the edge of a nearby chair, steadying myself, refusing to let him see me crumble completely.

"I’m what?"

"You heard that too."

I shook my head slowly, disbelief spreading across my face like a stain I couldn’t scrub out. "That’s ridiculous," I whispered, my voice barely audible over the roaring in my own head.

"Is it?"

"Yes!" The word burst out of me. I stepped forward without even realizing it, anger pushing through the shock, a wave finally breaking after being held back too long. Months of swallowed doubts, of excuses made on his behalf, of silence I had mistaken for patience... all of it surged up at once. "You don’t get to blame me for everything that went wrong in your life!"

His eyes hardened, turning to polished ice. "I bought you a house, Lillian," he said, his voice dropping into that low, lethal tone he used when he was tearing down business rivals, the one that used to make grown men shrink in boardrooms and scramble to agree with whatever he said next. "I placed you on a monthly allowance. Weekly shopping. I opened a trust for the baby... something I never even did for my wife! Yet you wanted more. You were greedy for more. You wanted her home. You made me chase her out of our matrimonial bedroom. You used the child as leverage and made me push my own wife away!"

The sheer nerve of it made my head spin. I couldn’t believe what was coming out of his mouth, couldn’t believe this was the same man who once whispered that I was the best thing that had happened to him in years, who had traced promises into my skin in the dark and called them truths.

"You had every hand in it as I did!" I yelled back, my voice shaking with raw rage, tears spilling hot over my lashes. "You chased your wife into another man’s arms! You made her leave! If you truly loved her, you would have stood your ground, Graham! You wouldn’t have allowed ’another woman’ to ruin your precious ’marriage’! You should have played the doting husband, but no - you wanted it all! What happened to surrogacy or adoption, huh? You wanted the thrill, you wanted me, and you wanted her sitting at home waiting for you!"

I stepped right up to the edge of his desk, slamming my palms down on the polished wood. The sting of the impact barely registered against the storm roaring inside me, my whole body trembling with the force of everything I had kept bottled for so long.

"So don’t you dare blame me! You are at fault! You are weak, Graham! It might not have been me, it might have been another woman! You are at fault!"

He didn’t even flinch. He just sat there, looking up at me like I was a minor inconvenience on his schedule, something to be managed rather than someone to be heard, someone whose pain barely registered as noise.

"If you are so self-righteous," I spat, wiping at my wet cheeks with the back of my trembling hand, "let me know and I will leave!"

I didn’t mean it. God, I didn’t mean it. It was a desperate bluff, a pathetic attempt to see if there was a single shred of fear in him at the thought of losing me, losing this baby. Some small, foolish part of me still hoped he would rise from that chair and beg me to stay, that he would remember the softness we once shared and let it undo this cruelty. But seeing him sit there, calmly defending that barren bitch while treating me like dirt, tore whatever was left of my heart to pieces.

"Then leave," he said flatly, not even bothering to raise his voice.

He leaned forward, restlessly checking the face of his watch before looking back up at me, as though I were delaying something far more important, some meeting or deal that actually mattered to him.

"You think you’re giving an ultimatum, Lillian? You’re not. If you’re waiting for me to beg you to stay, you’re going to be standing there until you collapse. I gave you a house. I gave you money. I gave you security. But you wanted her title. You wanted her place. And in your greed, you blew up the entire board."

"I loved you!" I sobbed, the words coming out cracked and ugly, torn from somewhere deep and raw, somewhere I hadn’t known could hurt this much.

"And I needed an heir," he replied without a second of hesitation. "You were useful. Now you’re just loud."

The dismissal felt like a physical blow, worse than anything he could have screamed at me. My breath came in shallow, ragged hitches, and for a moment I thought my knees might actually give out beneath me. I had to grip the edge of the desk just to stay upright, my vision blurring with tears I refused to let fall freely in front of him.

"You’re an absolute monster," I whispered.

"And you’re still standing in my office," he said coldly, pointing a sharp finger toward the heavy double doors. "Take your pathetic little bag of food that you brought to play house with, and get out."

I stood there, trembling from head to toe, my hands instinctively dropping back over my stomach to protect the only thing I had left. He didn’t look at my stomach. He didn’t look at my face. He just picked up a pen from his desk and looked down at his papers, completely tuning me out like I was already gone, like I had never mattered at all, like the last several months of my life had been nothing more than an inconvenient footnote in his.

My chest tightened until I could barely breathe. I reached down for the tote bag on the chair beside me, my fingers shaking so badly I almost dropped it. The metal flask inside clinked softly against the side, an absurdly small sound against the wreckage of everything else, almost mocking in its ordinariness.

Every fiber of my body wanted to turn and run, but as my fingers wrapped around the strap, the sting of his coldness turned into something sharper, something bitter that burned right through the shock and settled low in my chest like a coal, feeding a fire I hadn’t known I was capable of carrying.

I didn’t turn around immediately. I stood my ground, my knuckles white against the bag, staring straight at the top of his bowed head as he continued clicking his pen, refusing to grant me even a final glance, as if my departure required none of his attention at all.

"Just know this, Graham," I said, my voice dropping lower, completely stripped of the begging, stripped of the tears.

He didn’t look up, but the steady clicking of his pen stopped.

"You are stuck with me," I continued, each word carefully measured and heavy. "Elena is gone and she will never come back. You ruined your own marriage, Graham. Do not shift the blame to me to make yourself feel like a victim. You ruined it. You fucked me, and you loved it."

I didn’t wait for his response. I didn’t care to see if the insult registered in his cold eyes, didn’t care whether he even looked up at all.

I turned on my heel, my chin lifted, and walked out, letting the door click shut behind me, the sound final and absolute, like the closing of something that could never be reopened, a Chapter sealed shut with no hope of rewriting.