Chapter 246:
And for a woman who had been falling for a long time, the ground looked very tempting.
The next morning, Aurora was annoyed.
A gossip blog had picked up the photo of her and Sawyer. The headline read: Tech Queen & Banking Prince: A Match Made in Billions?
She groaned, sipping her coffee. She opened Instagram. She posted a photo of her espresso machine with a stack of coding manuals.
Caption: Single. Focused. The only relationship I have is with Java.
In the boardroom of Thorne Capital, located on the top floors of the Obsidian Tower, Elias’s phone buzzed. He glanced at the notification.
He smiled.
It was a small, terrifying smile. He knew exactly why she posted it. It was a message to Sawyer, not the world.
His CFO, who was presenting a grim quarterly report on the recently acquired assets, stopped mid-sentence. “Sir? Is… is the news bad?”
“No,” Elias said, locking his phone. “The news is excellent. Proceed.”
Meanwhile, across the city, Vivian Kensington was bored.
She was lying in her hospital bed, scrolling through her feed. She needed attention. The sympathy from her “accident” was fading, and the legal noose around her neck regarding Noah Reed was tightening, though she refused to admit it to herself.
She found a folder on her cloud drive labeled Old Photos.
She scrolled past hundreds of selfies until she found one she hadn’t taken.
It was a photo of Aurora from three years ago. They were on a yacht. Aurora was standing at the railing, wearing a backless white dress. The wind had caught her hair. It was ethereal. You couldn’t see her face, just the graceful curve of her spine and the silhouette.
Vivian remembered mocking that dress. Cheap fabric, she had said.
But now… it looked expensive. It looked like art.
Desperate to reclaim some narrative control and unaware that her time was running out, Vivian cropped the date. She added a vintage filter.
She posted it.
Caption: Dreaming of better days. The sea heals all wounds. #Recovery #Muse
She tagged the location as “Amalfi Coast”—a lie—and tagged @KensingtonOfficial.
Within an hour, the photo went viral.
People loved the “mystery girl” aesthetic.
Then, a notification popped up that made Vivian’s heart stop.
@SirAlistairCaldwell commented: Is this… is this you? The Angel of Paris?
Vivian froze. Sir Alistair Caldwell. The billionaire art collector. The man who had been searching for the “mystery woman” who saved him from a heart attack outside the Louvre three years ago.
Vivian did the math. She wasn’t in Paris three years ago. Aurora was. Aurora had been there on a budget trip with Sterling.
But Sir Alistair didn’t know that.
Vivian’s follower count began to tick up. 10k. 20k.
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