𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐁𝐈𝐋𝐋𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐀𝐈𝐑𝐄 𝐁𝐀𝐂𝐇𝐄𝐋𝐎𝐑 || 𝐋.𝐌 ✓

➢Chapter 24- Catastrophe and the cure

Y/n didn't wear heartbreak well. She knew because each and every person who'd seen her recently had told her she looked tired or asked if she was getting sick.

The mailman. The linen delivery guy. Her mother. Her father. Snookey, who usually minded his own business, had taken to checking on her regularly. Diana had brought Merina a cup of hot tea every evening without being asked.

Y/n pretty much lived in her office. The more she worked, the easier it would be to forget she was grieving. Right?

Wrong.

Charlotte had dropped off the papers to Lucius's secretary three days ago. Y/n had told herself she wasn't expecting a response, but she'd waited to hear from him. No way could he allow this to happen.

He'd remained distant and silent. Nothing had changed him. Not the moment she put her heart in his hands, or given him her body one final time. Not putting off signing the divorce papers on a marriage she was far more invested in than she should've been. Not finally signing them.

He was gone.

Y/n accepted this horrible fact and felt every painful prick of it like a thousand needles in her skin.

Diana had shut down the bar and Y/n's parents had gone home hours ago. In her office, door cracked open, no one to witness her misery, Y/n decided to feel her feels. Every last miserable one of them. An audible sob left her lips, the sound so lonely, it beckoned more sadness.

Her last period had been a relief, because the last time she and Lucius slept together, neither of them had the presence of mind to use a condom. For a few terrifying days, she was sure she was pregnant. The gods had smiled on her misfortune, deciding it'd be a d*ck move to add a baby on top of a divorce.

So. That was good, she guessed.

She reached for a tissue and dabbed her cheeks, vowing this the last surge of emotion she'd allow to wreck her. One final torrential downpour of a cry. Which, ironically, was what it was doing outside now. The papers were signed. She'd crossed the finish line. Only a little longer and she'd soon begin to heal.

She hoped.

Y/n swiped her fingers under her eyes and decided to go out to the bar for something stronger than the tepid tea on her desk. She'd been drinking too much wine lately, but she'd read an article that "situational alcoholism" was a thing.

Tonight, especially, she'd earned a glass of wine. Hell, a bottle.

Thunder rattled the walls as she slipped by the front desk, relieved to find Snookey waylaid by a late check-in. While his attention was diverted, Y/n bolted around the CLOSED sign at the doorway of the bar.

Yes. A bottle of wine would do fine. Maybe she'd go into the banquet room and drink it in there. She grabbed an open bottle, and a wineglass. Tempting to drink it directly from the source, but she did have some sense of decorum.

She took two steps and stopped cold when a man wearing jeans, a shirt, and a suit jacket stepped past the CLOSED sign. Water dripped on the carpet with a soft tap-tap from his soaking clothes.

Like the first time she'd met him, his posture was straight. In a weird gender flip of that same scenario, his clothes were adhered to his skin. His typically perfect hair was in disarray on his head, water curling the ends and dripping from his forehead down the tip of his nose.

She tried to speak. Failed.

The ladder she had been mentally climbing shook, threatening her path to recovery. She imagined herself sliding down a neighboring chute instead. No. No chutes. Only ladders.