Isolde received the text from her associate just before dawn. Confrontation happened. He knows.
She didn’t rage. She didn’t break anything else. The time for emotional outbursts was over. She had lost Caspian for good. The game had changed.
Her strategy pivoted instantly from manipulation to preemptive attack. Her goal was no longer to keep the man, but to destroy the woman who had taken him, and to save herself in the process.
“We need to frame her,” she said into her phone, her voice a low, menacing whisper. “Something to make her look unstable. Violent. A deranged fan, perhaps? One of her little ‘ghosts’ who takes things too far. Plant the seed. Make it believable.”
She was no longer playing for love. She was playing for survival.
Across town, in the quiet sanctuary of Zara’s apartment, Lyra was awake. The sun streamed through the window, but she felt none of its warmth. Zara sat beside her on the sofa, a steaming mug of tea in her hands.
“You should quit the show, Lyra,” Zara said gently. “You’ve told your truth. Now you need to disappear. Go somewhere quiet. Protect yourself. Protect the baby.”
Lyra shook her head, a small but firm gesture. “No.”
“Why not?” Zara pressed, her concern evident. “What’s left to prove?”
“It’s not about proving anything anymore,” Lyra explained, her gaze fixed on the dust motes dancing in the sunlight. “For the first time in my life, I have a voice. A real one. That stage… it’s the only platform I have to control my own story. If I run now, they’ll write the ending for me.”
Her music was her only weapon. And her only shield.
The battle lines were redrawn.
In a black town car idling in a sterile corporate parking garage, Caspian reviewed the first encrypted file from his investigator. It was a list of shell corporations, all linked to a single charitable entity: `The Finch Foundation`. His grief and shame had crystallized into a singular, cold purpose.
In a sunlit room filled with the scent of tea and lemon, Lyra picked up her guitar. Her fingers found the strings, and she wrote a new lyric. It wasn’t a song about heartbreak.
It was about a cage made of lies, and the woman who was finally learning how to break the bars.
They were fighting the same war now, from different fronts, entirely unaware of the other’s campaign.
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