The more I read the more I feel like hitting my head on something, or slamming a knife against my chest and letting the sharp end go in so fast it just stops everything.“This is going to put a lot of people in trouble.”Caelum chuckles beside me and when he speaks, his voice tickles something at the back of my brain though his statement is solemn, “I don’t believe they’re thinking about any of that.”I agree with him because they’re not. It’s obvious they’re not.Volta Shipping isn’t just any shipping company, they have ties everywhere, and even if they seem small, I don’t think they are. They’re one of those organizations I never got to wrap my head around, to be honest. Nothing seemed clear cut when it came to them, but they served my purpose so their origins at the time wasn’t that big of a stumbling block“A scandal of this size could sink Volta.”They don’t have the necessary footholds to survive something of this magnitude, not to talk of the fact that Ulric doesn’t know what t

Alora’s response does not surprise me, but the efficiency of the task does. I realize that I can see what Caleum meant when he told me to go ask Alora. He didn’t just want me to congratulate Alora on her return to reporting. He wanted to save me the stress of having to find things out myself. Things like who to truly side with within this Volta vs Highrise dilemma, and while siding with Volta would have been the easiest and best choice, now I know it’s the right choice too.I know I wasn't wrong with my judgment, and Alora has done the fact-finding to prove it.“Did you get what you needed from her?”Caelum is still seated on the couch when I return, and this time I don't even think twice about it. I throw myself onto the couch with a slump, sitting as close to him as I can and feeling the warmth of his skin on mine through his shirt as I respond.“Ulric is the one setting the company up. I was right.”Caelum chuckles in a way that makes me feel he’s saying there was never a doubt ab

Caelum doesn’t let us speak about Volta, and in the spirit of that, I let myself relax in his arms for the rest of the day. I realize it’s nice to sit in Caelum’s highrises’s arms. He doesn’t like it when I call him Highrise, and I realize I don't like it too much.Mostly because the name Highrise reminds me too much of the family connected to it, yet at the end of the day, my daughter bears that name. I bear that name.I want to stop bearing it because of the man who’s made the name a noose around my neck. Ulroic made the highrise name a rope by which he could tug me this way and that, and I let him. I let him do that out of the obligation I felt to be responsible for that name.Ulric made me hate the Highrise name, but Ravenna and Caelum make me feel like some good can come out of it.Like there’s hope, for me and for all of us who bear the name Highrise by association, and not by inheritance.“What are you thinking about?”I hear Caelum’s words strike chords in my heart and another

I watch as Alora pulls out a social media blog on her screen and I am hit by a sudden feeling of nostalgia.I totally forgot about the pictures I took with Ulric. I don’t know what effect they’ve had or what he’s using them for, and I feel foolish now because I was doing that with the belief that he’d hold up to his end of the bargain and give me my share of the wealth I helped him build for the better part of my life.I’d always had the feeling that Ulric would try to pull one last trick on me, and yet what confuses me is that for the life of me, I can't believe this is the trick he meant to pull on me.Ulric Highrise values his pride more than anything else, so I want to believe he had every intention of giving me the share he had promised once we got divorced. The share I made him agree to give me by signing. Ulric would have done it just to let it be a slap on my face, so maybe it’s my disbelief in the fact that he could do that, which got me into the mess I found myself in the f

“You know half the city is looking for you right now, right?”I only catch a sliver of Sebastien’s statement before I leave the room, yet I can already tell what he’s speaking about, who he’s speaking of, and what the implications of his words are. A short thrill of fear shoots up my spine because though Caelum acts all cool and composed, I can tell what the implications of that video will be now that we’ve decided to keep it up.Caelum showed off weapons with the ability to level the greatest mansion in the history of the past ten years, along with that, he killed the aged leaders of a prestigious pack. No one would believe that would have happened if you told them, yet it did, and all the world will care to know is that those weapons are still in his care and they should not be.They’ll try to attack Caelum from all sides. They’ll try to come at him with lawsuits for lack of a license to handle such weapons, try to label him a national enemy, of course, the real consequences of Ca