He Brought His Mistress, I Brought My Lawyers Chapter 24

He Brought His Mistress, I Brought My Lawyers Chapter 24

That sentence was like a cold needle, piercing through the phone and stabbing straight into Ethan’s brain.

Her face was injured.

His tall figure swayed. The phone slipped from his hand and hit the floor with a dull thud.

In his mind, Avery’s pale, bandaged face appeared at once. Her eyes, once filled with stars, had looked empty and dead.

For an instant, it felt as if his soul had been ripped out, his heart gripped by an invisible hand, the pain making it impossible to breathe.

After the call ended, he moved through the empty apartment like a sleepwalker. He didn’t know where he was going, but his legs instinctively carried him to the underground storage room at the Newport estate.

In the innermost compartment, a disheveled Sloane heard footsteps and lifted her head.

When she recognized the stubbled, bloodshot-eyed man in the doorway, wild laughter burst from her cracked lips.

“Ethan, look at you! What, still haven’t found your precious Avery?”

Ethan’s jaw clenched. His blood-red eyes glared at her.

“If you hadn’t ruined her face, how could I have lost every way to find her?”

“Still lying to yourself! Ethan, you’re still lying to yourself!” Sloane’s laughter grew sharper. She struggled up from the floor like a trapped animal. “The person who drove Avery away was never me. It was you!”

She roared, every word a bullet.

“The one who locked her in that room was you! The one who forced her to apologize to me was you! The one who picked up those three champagne bottles and smashed them against her head with your own hands was also you! What right do you have to blame everything on my manipulation?”

Sloane’s words struck Ethan’s heart like a series of heavy blows.

His knees weakened. He barely steadied himself against the cold wall as a violent ringing exploded in his ears.

Her accusations echoed in his mind. The images he had deliberately ignored flashed back, frame by painful frame.

Avery’s eyes.

He remembered them.

From the first shock and disappointment at the tasting dinner.

To the cold, emotionless voice that came through the door after he locked her away.

To the moment the champagne shattered over her head, when her bloodstained eyes looked at him with nothing but complete, ash-gray indifference.

Her heartbreak hadn’t happened in an instant.

It had been disappointment after disappointment, layer after layer peeled away, until he finally crushed it with his own hands.

And he had been blind the entire time.

“Ah!”

Ethan let out a suppressed roar and slammed his fist into the wall.

Once.

Again.

Again.

He seemed unable to feel pain. Soon, the hard wall was stained with blood, his knuckles torn and mangled.

If he hadn’t taken Sloane’s lies over Avery’s truth, she never would have suffered such humiliation.

If he hadn’t stupidly believed that Sloane needed him to deliver “justice,” Avery would be his wife by now, standing in a church in her wedding gown, not vanished from his world.

He deserved all of this.

Avery’s departure was his cruelest punishment.

Ethan staggered out of the storage room. Blood streamed from the back of his hand, but he felt nothing.

A suffocating guilt seized his throat. He only wanted to do something, anything, to ease the pain that was tearing him apart.

He drove to the Newport Yacht Club and went straight to the underground wine cellar.

There, cases of champagne custom-made for his and Avery’s wedding were still neatly stacked. The gilded A&E on the bottles was a burning brand searing his eyes.

He grabbed one bottle and, without hesitation, smashed it against his own forehead.

Bang.

Glass shards flew. Cold champagne mixed with warm blood and ran down his face. Explosive pain shot through his head, but it was not one ten-thousandth of the pain in his heart.

He did not stop.

The second bottle.

The third.

These were for Sloane’s lies and malice.

Ethan’s movements were merciless, as if he were carrying out a belated judgment.

The fourth bottle.

The fifth.

The sixth.

These were what he owed Avery.

Her injuries. Her pain. The love he had destroyed with his own hands.

Beyond the pain that nearly split his skull, a violent dizziness seized him.

Ethan’s eyes closed. His tall body crashed to the ground, unconscious in the cold blood pooling on the wine cellar floor.