The heavy scent of lilies always made her gag. To the rest of the world, they symbolized purity and peace, but to Elara, they smelled like the polished mahogany of a casket and the copper tang of drying blood.
Elara sat in the corner of Julian's expansive penthouse, the floor-to-ceiling glass overlooking a city that looked like a motherboard of flickering gold. He sat across from me, swirling a glass of amber liquid that caught the light—the same shade of scotch my father used to drink.
"I found him," she began, her voice cracking through the silence of the room. "I found my dad in his study. It was a Tuesday. It was raining—one of those gray, miserable days where the sky feels like it's collapsing."
Julian didn't move. He didn't offer the hollow sympathies most people did. He just watched her with those dark, predatory eyes that made Elara feel like she was the only person in his universe. It was a billionaire's gaze—focused, expensive, and terrifyingly intense.
"The door was slightly ajar," she continued, the memory clawing its way up her throat. "I thought he was sleeping at his desk again. He'd been working eighteen-hour shifts trying to keep the firm afloat. I walked in to wake him for dinner, and I saw his hand... it was dangled over the edge of the mahogany, pale and unnaturally still. The glass of scotch had tipped over, soaking into the rug he'd bought for my mother on their tenth anniversary."
She took a shaky breath, fingers digging into the velvet upholstery of the sofa.
"He was slumped over a pile of bank statements and a single, crumpled receipt. I picked it up before the paramedics arrived. It was a bill for a boutique hotel downtown—The Gilded Rose. The timestamp was from two hours before his heart gave out. It was a 'salon appointment,' he'd told me earlier that day. After giving him a cheek kiss and lamenting her split ends, my mother left the house carrying his credit card in her high-end handbag.
With the ice in his glass clinking softly, Julian leaned forward and said, "And she wasn't at the salon."
"No," Elara muttered, a jagged spark of old anger flickering in her chest. "She was laughing in a room paid for by the man who was dying alone in a cold study with a man half my father's age. While she was busy being "serviced" by someone else, I saw the light disappear from his eyes. As I stood there with that receipt in my hand, it dawned on me that my father's death was not the result of a heart attack. Her betrayal drove him to die with a broken spirit."
Elara looked at Julian, expecting judgment or a polite change of subject. Instead, she saw a terrifying clarity in his expression.
"You've never told her," Julian stated. It wasn't a question.
"I couldn't," Elara said, a tear finally escaping. "I just watch her. I watch her wear the diamonds he bought her. I watch her sip mimosa at brunch and talk about how much she misses 'her rock.' I hate her, Julian. I hate her so much it feels like a physical weight in my lungs. But I'm just a student. I have nothing. She has the house, the accounts, the reputation."
Julian stood up then, his tailored suit jacket casting a long, sharp shadow across the marble floor. He walked over to me, kneeling so we were eye-to-eye. He took Elara's cold hands in his. His hold was firm and warm, like a silk cage.
"Grief is a heavy burden, Elara," he said, lowering his voice to a velvety purr. "You've been carrying this secret like a victim. It's time you started carrying it like a queen. But hatred... hatred is an investment."
She stared at him, perplexed. "What do you mean?"
He remarked, "The world thinks your mother is a grieving widow," with a faint, sinister smile on his lips. "In my world, debts are always collected. With interest. I believe she is a debtor."
Elara lied and said, "Julian, I don't want revenge," even though the idea made her heart race. "I just want it to stop hurting."
He whispered, "It stops hurting when the scales are balanced," as he reached up to remove the hair from her face. There was something cold and ancient behind his eyes, but his touch was electric. "Elara, you discovered your father dead. That was her gift to you. Now, let's see what kind of gift we can send back to her."
As Elara leaned into his touch, she was unaware that she had just exchanged one nightmare for another. Elara believed that in order to balance her life's books, she was hiring a savior. She no idea that Julian broke scales instead of just balancing them.
Elara experienced an odd calmness as the city lights twinkled outside. She wasn't by herself with my ghost for the first time in three years. There was a suitor for her—a strong, brilliant, billionaire suitor who promised to finish what my mother started.
Elara just didn't realize that when Julian "finished" something, there was never anything left but ash.