Caleb’s jaw clenched so hard I thought his teeth might shatter.
I reached up, unpinned the torn, ruined white veil from my hair, and let it flutter to the marble floor, landing directly on top of the broken pieces of his gold pen.
“The engagement was your trap,” I whispered. “But the ending is mine. Take them away.”
The federal agents marched Caleb and Evelyn down the long velvet runner—the exact path meant for my joyous wedding march.
No one was laughing now. The flashes of cell phone cameras illuminated their disgrace. Evelyn stumbled once in her heels, looking utterly broken. Caleb kept looking back over his shoulder, again and again, his eyes wide and desperate, as if he were waiting for someone, anyone, to intervene and remember that he was supposed to be a king.
But the world had already moved on. The doors of the cathedral slammed shut behind them, sealing their fate.
Three months later.
The church video, paired with the DNA evidence from the cufflink, became Exhibit A in the most explosive corporate criminal trial of the decade. Caleb didn’t even make it to a jury. Once the forensic accountants unraveled the massive web of shell companies, he took a blind plea deal, securing himself twenty years in federal prison.
Evelyn fought longer, utilizing her remaining social capital, but she lost infinitely harder. Marcus took the stand as a state witness, crying like a child as he detailed every order Evelyn had ever given him. She was sentenced to fifteen years in a minimum-security facility, stripped of every asset she owned.
ValeTech not only survived the scandal, but it also thrived. The stock price skyrocketed once the corrupt board members were purged, leaving the company cleaner, sharper, and infinitely more ruthless than it had been before.
My split lip healed perfectly.
