Page 174 of The Contract

No… not anymore. She never was.

Adrian lets out a low, satisfied sigh. “She’s so fucking good at her job, isn’t she?”

Something inside me breaks apart, shatters, and burns.

My jaw clenches so hard my teeth might crack. My chest is a live wire of fury, rage, and something deeper—something worse.

I grit out, slow and lethal, “I swear to God, you’re going to fucking die for this.”

Adrian just laughs. The sound is cruel, dripping with mockery.

“Careful, Wolfe,” he muses, his voice light, entertained. “She’s just doing what she does best. Entertaining powerful men. Wasn’t that the whole arrangement you hired her for?”

The world tilts.

I feel like I might snap apart at the seams.

For half a second, I hesitate.

My grip tightens around the phone, my breath dragging in, ragged, uneven. There’s a whisper of something beneath the fury—something hollow, aching, desperate to find a reason, any reason, to believe this isn’t what it looks like.

But then Adrian laughs again, smug and victorious before he groans loudly, and that whisper dies.

I see red.

“Go to hell.”

“Already there,” he murmurs. “And your girl?” He chuckles. “Actually, she never stopped being my girl. She’s on her knees right in front of me.”

Everything explodes when he disconnects the call.

With a growl ripped straight from my soul, I pick up the crystal decanter of whiskey next to me and throw it across the room, shattering it on impact.

My breath is ragged, my vision blurred at the edges. My muscles coil so tightly I think I might combust, might punch through the walls, might tear this entire fucking building to the ground.

Marcus doesn’t say a word.

Because there’s nothing to say.

Elena is a fucking snake.

And Adrian?

I’m going to end him.

The room feels like it’s collapsing inward, the weight of everything suffocating as the reality of this mess tightens around me like a noose.

I barely register the sound of my phone vibrating against the table until Marcus glances up from his laptop, his expression grim.

“Calloway.”

Shit.

I swipe to answer, already bracing for impact. “Richard?—”

“You arrogant son of a bitch!” His voice is a crack of thunder, livid, shaking with barely restrained fury. “What the hell have you done?”

Every muscle in my body tenses. “What are you talking about?”

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