Chapter4

I stood at the window and watched the familiar black Maybach roll through the villa gates and vanish around the corner.

Sebastian had taken Olivia out to "handle the aftermath." They thought I was still in the basement. They thought I was down there, falling apart.

They were wrong.

I walked into the bedroom. I looked at the bed that had once been ours, and I felt nothing.

I took out the red paint—a prop I had prepared long in advance.

I drew a slow breath, then hurled the can at the floor.

The crimson paint splattered like blood across everything. I grabbed a jagged shard and raked it across the wall until the surface looked as though it had been clawed by something wild and desperate.

"Goodbye, you bastard," I whispered to the empty room.

In the center of the floor, in twisted, dripping strokes, I painted the words: You did this to me.

I took off the red dress—the one Sebastian loved, the one that had borne witness to his betrayal.

I grabbed the hem and tore it with everything I had. The sound of ripping fabric cut through the silence. I shredded it to pieces, as if tearing apart the last thin illusion of what we had ever been.

The farewell note was the final step.

I imitated my own handwriting at its most unraveled and wrote: Sebastian's psychological cruelty made life unbearable… He locked me inside this gilded cage, wrapped his chains in sweet words…

At the end, I deliberately wrote farewell where someone might have written forgiveness.

The police would believe it. A wife tortured by her husband, taking her own life on their wedding anniversary—what more perfect tragedy could there be?

Once the scene was set, I changed into the courier uniform I had prepared and tucked my hair under a brown wig.

At the door, I took one last look at the carnage of crimson and chaos. The scraps of the red dress trembled in the draft from the hallway, as if mocking every naïve fantasy I had ever nursed about love.

By the time they found it, I would already be on a private jet bound for Paris.

The news alert hit my phone like a slap: Socialite Widow Leaves Blood-Soaked Suicide Note, Accuses Husband of Psychological Abuse. The photo showed police tape stretched across the villa gates—and Sebastian's face, more frightened than I had ever seen it.

Good. He should be frightened.

The police would dig into his phone, his bank accounts. They would find every wire transfer he had made to Olivia, every threatening message he had sent me and assumed he had deleted.

Public opinion would nail him to the wall, and I—the "dead and perfect wife"—would become the object of everyone's sympathy.

Five years of marriage. Five years of bubbles. All of it collapsed in a single night.

But my revenge? This was only the opening move.