Chapter 8

Isabella's POV

Honestly, the last thing I wanted was to let him drag this out any longer.

Standing in front of this hypocrite, I felt as though all the air was being slowly wrung from my lungs.

"I didn't go anywhere. I was resting, Julian. Have you already forgotten? I've been pulling night shifts all week. I needed to sleep."

"Resting." He let out a short, contemptuous laugh. "Don't give me that, Isabella. I checked your room. There was no one in it."

"It's a big estate." I met his gaze and held it. "Who says I'm only allowed to sleep in my own room? You wouldn't understand, Julian. Sometimes I wander. Sometimes there are surprises in the most unexpected places."

The muscle along Julian's jaw tightened visibly, a vein pulsing at his temple.

He understood exactly what I meant. But that's the thing about men like him — dishonesty isn't just a habit. It's an art form they've spent years perfecting.

"Enough of this, Isabella." His voice sharpened. "Tell me where you actually were last night. Every single person at that estate spent the whole night searching for you by torchlight — and your family's manor only has power in the front hall, in case you'd forgotten."

"Then they were clearly looking in all the wrong places."

I tilted my chin slightly upward. "If they'd tried a 365-nanometer UV-A light, they might have found something far more interesting."

Julian's pupils contracted.

As a consultant physician, he knew precisely what I was referring to. Under that specific wavelength, certain biological traces left in the dark don't stay invisible for long.

The colour drained from his face.

He knew I had seen them.

Several seconds of silence passed before he spoke again, and when he did, his tone carried the strained quality of a man manufacturing composure on the spot. "Isabella, what happened with Clara was nothing. It was a party. There was alcohol. These things — "

"Funny you should mention that." I cut him cleanly across. "Because I don't recall my parents including Clara's name on the invitation list. If she arrived with you, that's one thing. If not, I can have her reported for trespassing right now."

We had come this far, and he was still trying to wriggle out of it?

"I said enough." He broke before I could finish, his brow furrowing as though I were the one responsible for this entire mess. "So what if something happened between me and Clara? Don't pretend you were ever truly invested in me. If I weren't the Hawthorne heir — if I weren't positioned to cover your family's debts — a proud little aristocrat like you would never have given me a second look."

"You're right."

I looked directly into his eyes and said it plainly, one word at a time. "I don't need to marry you specifically. I just need someone who can help with those debts."

There was no satisfaction in saying it. No surge of triumph. Only a kind of hollowed-out grief — the quiet, anaesthetic kind that sets in after the worst of it is already over.

Every small, careful act of love I had offered him — every compromise I had made in the hope that something real might grow between us — he had just summed it all up as a financial transaction. He had reduced it without hesitation, without guilt. As though attaching a price tag to my feelings gave him full licence to betray them.

You'll never know, Julian. It wasn't the betrayal itself that broke something in me. It was the way you held your head so high while you did it — the way you ground down whatever was left of my hope for you and felt absolutely nothing.

You did that. You chose to.

Then his gaze dropped to my left hand.

More precisely — to the antique-cut diamond ring on my fourth finger.

He went very still.

For the first time in all the years I'd known him, those habitually arrogant eyes held something unguarded: pure, unfiltered shock.

"That ring." His voice shifted. "Isabella — why are you wearing that ring?"

The next instant his head snapped up, and his expression curdled into something darker — angry and cold all at once.

"That bastard. Adrian Hawthorne." He said the name like he was spitting out something foul. "Same as he always was. A fraud. An absolute waste of a human being."

He stepped toward me sharply. "Do you actually believe that wearing a ring he stole from his grandfather makes you a legitimate Hawthorne? That's almost funny. You have no idea what that man has been doing abroad all these years."

His voice dropped, taking on an edge I recognised — the kind he used when he wanted to make sure the wound went deep.

"Robert, your family's old groundskeeper, told me last night that you left in his car. I assumed the old man's eyesight was going. Isabella — have you really sunk so low that any man who crooks a finger at you is enough? Is that where you are now?"

At that moment, a sharp burst of barking erupted from just outside the door.

Lucas came out of nowhere — a streak of black and white that moved like a reflex. He planted himself in front of me, a low, continuous growl building in his chest, his eyes fixed on Julian with absolute clarity of purpose.

"Not this damn dog again." Julian's face twisted with revulsion. He drew his foot back to kick.

He had underestimated Lucas entirely.

Lucas surged forward and clamped his teeth onto the edge of Julian's shoe with the determination of an animal who had decided, once and for all, that this person was a threat.

"Get off — you stupid animal — "

Julian wrenched his leg back and forth. Lucas held on without question.

"Lucas, release."

I crouched down and laid my hand gently over his head, trying to recall the way Adrian had done it in the car — steady, unhurried. "Good boy. That's enough. Stand down."

He let go at once. He stepped back behind me and kept watching Julian, every muscle still coiled and ready.

I straightened up.

"I thought, once, that I could marry into the Hawthorne family with my dignity intact." I raised my left hand and let the ring catch what dim light the room offered, its facets cold and clear. "But I would rather wear this ring — and be treated as though I am worth something — than let you put anything on my finger ever again."

"Julian. We're done."

His face cycled through several colours in quick succession. Then he took a step forward, and the contempt in his eyes hardened into something deliberate.

"You genuinely think Adrian is going to marry you?" His voice was almost pitying. "A man who spent ten years abroad and came back with nothing? He was living there on a fraudulent residency permit, Isabella. And that's not even the worst of it." He paused, making sure I was listening. "He has a family over there. A wife. Children old enough to run around on their own. You care so much about appearances — so much about how things look — just imagine what it will mean when word gets out that Isabella Kensington married a taken man with a stolen ring. The Kensington name won't just be in debt. It'll be a joke."

I stepped back.

The words hit like a crack of thunder directly overhead, close enough to feel in the chest.

He was already married?