Chapter 10
The ultimate reckoning didn’t come with guns or threats. It came, fittingly, through the exact platform that had tried to destroy her.
Three weeks after the video, Tiffany Monroe sat alone in a studio she couldn’t afford anymore, recording an apology her publicist had all but written for her, every sponsor gone, every door Gabriel had quietly closed still closed. She stared into the camera the same way she had that night, except now there was no table of friends laughing behind her, no audience cheering her on.
“I was cruel,” she said, voice unsteady in a way it had never been on camera before, “to a woman who never did anything to me except exist in a body I decided was funny to mock. I don’t have an excuse. I had an audience, and I used her to keep it.”
She didn’t know Eleanor would ever see it. She didn’t know Eleanor was watching from her own kitchen, Gabriel’s hand resting quiet on her shoulder, not gloating, not satisfied in the way she might have expected from a man with his reputation — just present, the way he always was now.
“Do you forgive her?” Gabriel asked.
“I don’t know yet.” Eleanor turned the television off. “But I don’t need to decide that tonight. Tonight I just want to not think about her at all.”
He nodded, like that was the only answer that had ever mattered.
Brandon Pierce’s company folded four months after the meeting in Gabriel’s office, quietly, the way Gabriel had promised it would — no headlines, no scandal, just investors who stopped calling and a lease he couldn’t make rent on.
He tried once to reach Gabriel directly, left three messages with an assistant who never called back. On the fourth attempt, a single text arrived from an unknown number.
You already had your meeting, Mr. Pierce.
May you like
He never heard from the number again. Six months later, a former colleague spotted him managing a sports bar on the outskirts of the city, polite to customers in a way he’d never bothered to be before, flinching slightly whenever a phone came out of someone’s pocket at the bar.
Nobody ever told him that was intentional. He understood it anyway.
