Chapter 26 - 0026: Shut It, Maltida

Chapter 26: Chapter 0026: Shut It, Maltida

Elena’s Point Of View

I sat on the cold floorboards for what felt like an eternity, the silence of the locked office pressing in on my chest until the heavy sobs finally slowed to ragged, shallow breaths. The quiet afterward felt almost worse than the crying itself, a hollow stillness that gave me nothing to hide behind.

In that stillness, I could hear my own heartbeat, slow and stubborn, refusing to let me forget that I was still alive, still breathing, still trapped in this life I no longer recognized.

I raised my shaking hands, pressing my icy palms against my burning cheeks. My fingers came away wet and stained with smudged mascara. Slowly, I dragged myself up using the edge of the gilded mirror frame, my knees trembling under my weight, my whole body feeling foreign and unsteady, as though grief had rearranged something fundamental inside me.

I caught my reflection one last time... red-nosed, eyes swollen, silk blouse still wrinkled, and forced myself to button the shirt back up, hiding the purple needle scars over my stomach, the small constellation of failures no one else was allowed to see.

Each scar had a story attached to it, a hope that had died on some sterile hospital table, and I had learned long ago to keep those stories locked away where no one could use them against me.

I went to the small adjoining washroom, splashed cold water over my face until my skin went numb, and wiped the black streaks from under my eyes with a damp paper towel. The cold helped, if only for a moment, tricking my body into thinking it might be capable of composure.

I stared at the stranger in the mirror above the sink, wondering when exactly I had stopped recognizing the woman staring back at me, wondering if she had ever really existed at all or if I had invented her to survive.

Divorce.

The word felt foreign, heavy, and terrifying on my tongue, but as I stared at myself in the small mirror, it was the only thing that brought a strange, hollow sense of clarity. Maybe divorce was the only way out of this waking nightmare. Maybe it was the only piece of dignity I had left to salvage.

I couldn’t keep sleeping behind a locked door with a chair jammed under the handle. I couldn’t keep running out of my own home at six in the morning like a thief. I couldn’t keep pretending that the marriage I had once hoped would save me wasn’t the very thing suffocating me. Somewhere along the way, I had traded my own name for a title that had cost me everything and given me nothing but silence and suspicion in return.

I stayed at the atelier until well past seven in the evening, deliberately lingering over fabric swatches I had already approved, calculating the exact time it would take for the household to finish dinner and retire to their respective rooms.

I wanted the hallways empty. I wanted the foyer dark. I wanted, more than anything, to disappear into my own house without having to perform a single word of explanation.

The thought of facing anyone... Graham, his mother, the staff who watched me with quiet, careful eyes, made my stomach twist into knots I didn’t have the strength to untangle.

By eight-thirty, I finally drove through the wrought-iron gates of the estate, my hands still gripping the steering wheel a beat too long after I parked, as if bracing myself for whatever waited inside. The engine ticked as it cooled, and I sat there in the dark for a moment longer, gathering whatever fragments of composure I still had left, knowing they wouldn’t be enough.

The house was quiet when I stepped across the threshold, the cool air smelling of fresh polish and expensive lilies. I slipped off my heels, holding them by the straps, and began creeping toward the grand staircase on silent, bare feet, my heartbeat loud in my own ears with each cautious step. I had almost made it to the third stair, had almost let myself believe I would escape unseen.

"Elena."

My heart dropped straight into my stomach.

I stopped on the runner, turning my head slowly toward the main living room. The lights were fully lit. Sitting on the dark velvet sofas were Graham, his mother Matilda, and Lillian. A silver tea service sat on the glass coffee table between them, steam rising lazily from porcelain cups, the whole scene arranged with such practiced elegance that it felt like a stage set waiting for me to walk into it.

I almost laughed at the absurdity of it... the three of them sitting there so calmly, as though they hadn’t been waiting to ambush me the moment I walked through the door.

Graham stood up immediately, stepping over the rug toward me before I could take another step toward the stairs. His face was pale, his dark hair slightly disheveled, and the shadow of stubble along his jawline only emphasized how tired he looked, as though he too had spent the day fighting some private, exhausting battle.

Despite everything, some small, foolish part of me still noted the way exhaustion suited him, softened the sharp lines of his face into something almost human.

He reached out, his long fingers wrapping tightly around my wrist. "You’ve been avoiding me, Elena. You’ve ignored my calls, you locked the doors, and you leave this house before the sun even comes up."

I didn’t flinch. I didn’t try to pull my hand away. I just looked down at his grip on my skin, then up into his tired eyes, searching for some trace of the man I had once believed I could love, and finding only exhaustion staring back. Whatever had existed between us once, whatever fragile tenderness I had mistaken for love, had long since curdled into something closer to obligation.

"You are not worth me looking forward to seeing, Graham," I said, my voice dead and completely devoid of warmth. "Let go of me."

"Elena, please..."

"If you’re so unhappy with how I’m acting, then let’s get a divorce," I cut in smoothly, the words falling out of my mouth before I could stop them. "It’s that simple."

Graham’s grip on my wrist tightened so hard it pinched the bone, his dark eyes flashing with a sudden, dangerous intensity. "Impossible. That’s never going to happen, Elena. You’re my wife, and it will remain like that. You’re never leaving me."

A sharp, artificial chuckle broke the tension from across the room.

Lillian stood up from the velvet armchair, smoothing the front of her pale silk dress over the visible curve of her stomach. She looked at me with a mixture of pity and quiet smugness, an expression so practiced it seemed she had rehearsed it in front of a mirror. "If she wants to go, Graham, then just let her go. She’s of no use here anyways."

"Shut up, Lillian," Graham snapped over his shoulder, not breaking eye contact with me.

"No, Graham, she’s right," Matilda’s icy, aristocratic voice cut through the room like a silver blade. She sat perfectly erect on the sofa, a bone china teacup balanced casually in her lap, her sharp gray eyes locked onto me with absolute disdain. "She is entirely right. She’s a stain to our family name, Graham. I don’t even know what she’s still doing under this roof."

Matilda set her cup down on the saucer with a loud, deliberate clink that echoed off the high ceilings. She stood up, her expensive knit skirt falling effortlessly around her ankles as she walked toward us, her chin tilted up, every step measured like a queen approaching an unworthy subject. There was something almost theatrical about the way she moved, as though decades of practice had turned cruelty into an art form she performed with pride.

"Have you no self-respect left, Elena?" Matilda asked, stopping a few feet away, her eyes raking over my disheveled hair and my simple work clothes. "Or did you figure out that you’ll be completely homeless the moment you step outside those gates? Is that why you’ve decided to continue leeching off my son? Because you know you have nowhere else to go?"

A small, bitter smirk tugged at the corner of my dry lips, though the heat was rising rapidly behind my eyes, threatening to betray the composure I was struggling so hard to hold together. I refused to let her see me break, not here, not in this room where every crack in my armor would be catalogued and used against me later.

"Your precious son is the one who doesn’t want to let go of me," I said, looking right at Matilda before shifting my gaze back to Graham. "Tell him to get the divorce papers ready. Or better still... I’ll do it myself. I’ll contact my lawyers to have it prepared, and I’ll sign them happily."

"No one is getting divorced here, Mom," Graham barked, his voice booming through the foyer as he tugged my arm an inch closer to his chest. "Elena is still my wife."

Matilda let out a harsh, dry laugh. "Yes, Graham! But in name only! In her actual duties as a wife, she’s nowhere to be found!"

Matilda stepped closer, her sharp perfume suffocating the small space between us, thick enough that I nearly choked on it. I forced myself to hold my ground, to keep my spine straight even as everything inside me screamed to retreat.

"Look at you," Matilda continued, her voice dropping into that smooth, practiced tone she used whenever she wanted to strip me of every ounce of humanity. "Five years, Elena. Five years of wasting our family’s money on elite clinics, world-renowned specialists, and private retreats. Five years of my son coming home exhausted, hoping to hear good news, only to find you weeping over another failed attempt. You couldn’t even give him a single drop of hope. You couldn’t even manage a miscarriage to show that your body was capable of holding life!"

Every single word landed like a physical blow straight into the center of my chest. My lungs seized. My throat felt like it was closing up, raw and bleeding from the inside out, and for a moment I feared I might simply crumble right there on the runner in front of all three of them.

I thought of every needle, every appointment, every hollow-eyed morning spent grieving something that had never even had the chance to exist, and I hated her for reducing all of it to a single, cruel sentence.

"Mother, that’s enough!" Graham roared, but Matilda didn’t even blink.

"It is not enough!" Matilda yelled back, pointing a manicured finger directly at my face. "She sat at my table, drank my wine, wore the Sinclair pearls, and gave us absolutely nothing in return! An empty, barren shell of a woman! Lillian has been in this house for two months and has already secured the future of this estate! What have you done, Elena? What have you ever done besides consume his time and tarnish our legacy?"

"Mom, stop it!" Graham shoved himself slightly between us, but his grip was still locked around my wrist, keeping me anchored right in the eye of the storm.

"She is a parasite!" Matilda insisted, her voice rising in pitch, practically vibrating with years of stored-up hatred. "A useless, defective leech who knows she’s worthless without the Sinclair title! Look at her! She has no family, no real backing, and a womb that is nothing more than dried-up, useless stone..."

The air in my chest completely shattered. A hot, scalding tear burst over my lower lash, cutting a path through the dust on my cheek, my whole body shaking violently as the humiliation threatened to drop me to my knees right in front of them all, five years of grief and shame collapsing on top of me all at once. Something inside me, some last fragile thread of restraint, finally snapped clean in two.

"Shut it, Matilda!" I screamed, my voice cracking so loudly it ripped through the high ceilings of the house, stopping every single person in the room dead in their tracks.