The sterile, quiet safety of the clinic was the absolute antithesis of the bloody marble floor.
I let the silk robe slip from my shoulders. I turned my back to the glass, looking over my shoulder at my reflection. I gently traced my fingertips over the raised, angry red lines crisscrossing the pale skin of my back.
Twenty lashes. Twenty permanent, physical reminders of the price of silence. Twenty reminders of what happens when you shrink yourself to fit into a small man’s fragile ego.
But as I looked at the scars, I felt no shame. I felt no urge to hide them. The naive, quiet woman who had bled on that marble floor, begging for scraps of affection from a parasite, was dead. The woman looking back at me in the mirror was forged in absolute iron.
The heavy, mahogany door of the suite opened softly.
Alexander Sterling stepped into the room. The billionaire titan, a man whose mere signature could topple economies, stopped dead in his tracks. He looked at the horrific scars covering his daughter’s back, and the ruthless businessman entirely vanished, replaced by a father utterly undone by grief.
He stepped forward slowly, as if approaching a wounded animal. He wrapped his arms gently around my shoulders, pressing his face into my hair, terrified to touch my back.
“I should have burned his entire world down to the bedrock the very first day you met him,” Alexander whispered. His voice was thick, choking on a terrifying mixture of paternal sorrow and unquenchable rage. “I should never have let you play at being normal. I’m so sorry, Serena.”
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