After breakfast, Wilder checked his watch once and stood from the table.
A staff member was already waiting near the entrance with his coat.
He slipped it on, adjusted the cuffs, then looked at Nyxia.
“I have a meeting with a client,” he said.
“Stay home.
If anything happens, call me.”
Nyxia met his eyes and gave a short nod.
“Alright.”
He held her gaze for another second, as if measuring whether she would actually listen, before turning away.
The front door opened, then closed.
From the window, Nyxia watched his car move down the driveway and disappear beyond the gate.
Only then did her expression change.
This was the chance she had been waiting for.
She turned from the window and looked around the spacious living room.
The house was large, quiet, and still unfamiliar.
If she wandered alone, she would only waste time getting lost in corridors that all looked the same.
A different approach would be better.
One of the maids was arranging fresh flowers on the side table when Nyxia approached her.
“Excuse me,” Nyxia said, keeping her voice soft and slightly uncertain.
“Could you show me around the house?
I keep forgetting the rooms.
Every time I try to remember, it slips away again.”
The maid straightened at once, her face full of polite concern.
“Of course, Madam.
Please come with me.”
They began walking through the first floor.
The maid explained each room with careful patience.
The guest lounge.
The dining hall.
A smaller sitting room that faced the garden.
A library lined with tall shelves.
Nyxia listened, asked a few simple questions, and nodded at the right moments.
Outwardly she looked like a woman trying to recover broken pieces of memory.
Inwardly she mapped every door.
Then the maid stopped in front of a closed room at the end of a quieter hallway and opened it.
“This is Sir’s study,” she said.
Nyxia’s eyes moved across the interior at once.
A large desk.
Dark shelves.
Cabinets.
A locked drawer on the lower right side of the desk.
This was the room she needed.
She lifted a hand to her temple and let her brows draw together.
“I think this is enough for today.
My head feels heavy after trying to remember so many things.”
The maid immediately looked worried.
“Should I call a doctor, Madam?
Or bring medicine?”
“No.” Nyxia gave a small, tired smile.
“I just need to sit for a while.
I’ll rest here until the dizziness fades.”
“It’s alright.
I want to be alone for a moment.
It helps me calm down.”
The maid still hesitated near the door.
Nyxia kept her expression gentle but firm, and after a few more seconds the girl finally bowed and left, closing the door behind her.
The moment the footsteps faded, Nyxia’s smile sharpened.
She crossed the room quickly and stopped in front of the desk.
Stacks of documents sat in neat order.
She opened the first folder, then the second.
Business contracts.
Financial statements.
Meeting notes.
Her fingers moved faster with each file.
Then she pulled open the upper drawer and froze.
Inside was a thick proposal bound in black.
She lifted it onto the desk and opened the cover.
Her company name was printed on the first page.
The further she read, the colder her hands became.
Timeline for acquisition.
Assessment of company weaknesses.
Suggested pressure points.
Notes on internal vulnerabilities.
Detailed analysis of her shares and possible routes of takeover.
It was not a vague idea.
It was a structured plan.
Wilder had been preparing to take her business.
Nyxia’s jaw tightened.
Their hostility had always existed in the open.
They competed.
They blocked each other.
They clashed in meetings.
But this was different.
This was not rivalry placed on a table.
This was a quiet, deliberate move to swallow what she had built.
She shut the proposal harder than necessary and continued searching.
The lower drawer was locked.
She tried the side cabinets next, opening each one with rising urgency.
Files.
Reports.
More numbers.
Then, under a separated stack at the back of the third cabinet, she found a thin envelope that did not match the rest.
She opened it.
Photographs slid into her hand.
The first one made her breath stop.
Magnus and Nova.
They stood close together near a parked car at night.
Nova’s hand was on his arm.
His head was lowered toward her, far closer than friendship would ever allow.
The next photo was worse. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
They were sitting in a restaurant, fingers linked across the table.
Nova was smiling at him with the kind of expression Nyxia had once believed belonged only to her.
Wilder had been watching them.
Nyxia’s hands began to tremble as she flipped through the rest.
Date marks.
Different locations.
Different clothes.
This was not a single coincidence.
The photos had been taken over time.
Then one image stopped her cold.
She recognized the street at once.
The broken streetlight near the corner.
The same stretch of road where her car had stalled months ago.
That evening she had called Magnus and asked him to pick her up.
She had stood there in the heat, waiting, redialing his number.
He had answered with an impatient tone and said he had an important matter to handle.
He could not come.
In the photograph, taken from a distance, Magnus was helping Nova into a car.
His hand rested on her back.
Nova was laughing.
The timestamp matched the night Nyxia had waited alone on the roadside for a man who never arrived.
Her throat tightened.
She moved to the next photo, then the next.
In one of them, Nova leaned into Magnus while holding a bag that made Nyxia’s stomach drop.
She knew that bag.
The small scratch near the zipper.
The exact shade.
It had been hers.
In another photo, Nova wore a pair of shoes Nyxia used to keep on the second shelf of her closet.
The same shoes she had not been able to find months earlier and eventually assumed she had misplaced.
Nova had not only taken her lover.
She had worn Nyxia’s things while doing it.
The photos slipped slightly in her grip as her vision blurred.
One tear fell onto the corner of the paper, then another.
She pressed her lips together hard, but the pressure behind her eyes only worsened.
All those nights Magnus claimed to be busy.
All those moments Nova asked to borrow something with a sweet smile.
All those times Nyxia gave in because she thought that was what an older sister was supposed to do.
She had been standing in the middle of it and had seen nothing.
Nyxia sank into the chair behind the desk, the photographs still in her hands.
The acquisition proposal lay open beside her, its neat printed lines now looking almost distant compared to the images she could not stop seeing.
Wilder had been collecting both.
Her company on one side.
The proof of her humiliation on the other.
Her fingers curled around the edge of one photo until the paper bent.
Outside the study, the house remained quiet.
No footsteps.
No voices.
Only the sound of her own uneven breathing filled the room as she stared at the image of Nova’s hand on Magnus’s arm, at the shoes that should have been in her closet, at the night she had spent waiting for someone who had already chosen another woman.