Your choice.”
The senator’s polished face went pale at last; he had done the math on how much of this could stay quiet, and the answer was none of it.
“Watch yourself, Roberson,” he tried.
“You watch yours,” Corbin said, without even turning his head.
Camilla wrenched the enormous diamond from her finger and slammed it on the desk.
On her way to the door she stopped, just long enough to aim one last look at Adrienne.
“I hope you’re proud of yourself, maid,” she spat.
“Because of your little brat, you’ll be on the street by morning.”
Corbin stepped between them before the words had finished landing.
“You will not speak to her again,” he said, in a voice that ended the conversation, and the party, and the engagement, all at once.
For a moment the two of them faced each other, and Adrienne watched the last of the mask come off Camilla Bramwell.
The tears dried instantly, because they had never been real; the fragility evaporated, because it had only ever been a costume.
What was left underneath was cold and flat and entirely unrepentant — not a woman caught in a terrible mistake, but a professional whose project had failed at the final step, calculating already what could be salvaged.
She looked at Corbin with something almost like contempt, as though his crime was not that he’d been deceived but that he’d finally, inconveniently, stopped being deceivable.