Chapter 4: Time for my revenge
Sitting down beside Caspian was surreal but I needed to start planning immediately
I dialed Nicole’s Line, my manager and she picked up on the first ring, her voice already tight before I even spoke. "Valerie. What is it?"
"Liam wants me to step in for Amara," I said. "She has an important show today. He wants me to substitute her immediately, masked, so no one knows it’s me."
The explosion came exactly as I expected.
"Are you serious right now? He wants YOU to step in for that B-grade model? If you hadn’t stepped back from the spotlight Amara wouldn’t even survive in this industry and now he’s calling you to clean up her mess?" Nicole’s voice was shaking. "Please tell me you said no."
"I already agreed," I said calmly.
"Valerie I am going to lose my entire mind —"
"Nicole." My voice was quiet. Steady. "I agreed. But I am not going to let them use me. Not this time."
A pause. She knew that tone. She hadn’t heard it from me in a long time but she knew exactly what it meant.
"So you have a plan," she said slowly.
"I need you to do something for me. Amara is desperate to convince everyone she’s attending the show despite her injuries. She doesn’t want it to affect her eligibility for the paris fashion week. While I’m at the venue I need you to go to St Luke’s Hospital."
"To get evidence," Nicole said, catching on immediately. "Proof that she was still hospitalized during the show. Leak it to the press."
"That’s part of it," I said. "But there’s bigger news." I paused. "Amara is pregnant. The baby is Liam’s."
Silence.
"I also need you to prepare a formal statement documenting every single time Liam has used me to substitute for Amara. Every show. Every campaign. Every job done under her name without my credit, without my consent, without me knowing what I was actually walking into. Dig up everything Nicole. Every receipt."
She was quiet for a moment. Then her voice came back different. Lower. "I understand everything now. Those shameless disgusting people. They didn’t just betray you. They have been using you like a puppet this whole time."
"Can you do this for me?"
"Every single thing," she said without hesitation. "Don’t worry about my end. Just go. I’ve got you."
I hung up and sat back.
I didn’t tell her anything else. Not about this morning. Not about what I was carrying in my bag right now. Not about the name signed beside mine on a document that was going to change everything.
Some things were better kept close.
Beside me Caspian was scrolling through his phone, one leg crossed over the other, completely unbothered the way he always seemed to be. He hadn’t asked about my call. Hadn’t pushed. Hadn’t offered a single unsolicited opinion about what I should or shouldn’t be doing.
five years with Liam and I couldn’t make one decision without a lecture following right behind it.
A few hours with this man and he hadn’t once made me feel like I needed his permission to breathe.
I didn’t know what to do with that yet.
The car slowed as we pulled up to the venue. I could see staff moving around outside, the quiet controlled chaos of a show about to begin.
I picked up my bag. Reached for the door handle.
Then I stopped.
I turned back to Caspian.
He was already looking at me, phone lowered, waiting with that steady unreadable expression that gave nothing away.
"Give me a kiss," He said.
"You are my husband, you don’t need to be so formal."
Something moved across his face. Barely there. "We have been married for approximately less than an hour ."
"And yet." I held his gaze and smiled.
He looked at me for a long moment.
And then he leaned across, cupped my face in one hand and kissed me.
It was not a peck. It was not polite or quick or obligatory. It was brief and deliberate and absolutely certain of itself and it asked absolutely nothing while somehow saying everything.
He pulled back first.
Said nothing. Just looked at me with those green eyes like he hadn’t just rearranged something in my chest completely.
I giggled.
It came out slightly breathless which was embarrassing so I turned, pushed the door open and stepped out into the morning air before my face could betray me any further.
I did not look back.
But I was smiling when I walked through those doors and I could not fully explain why.
Liam had never once done that. Not in five years. Not once made me feel chosen rather than convenient. Not once made me feel like I was worth the effort of a single deliberate moment.
I filed that thought away somewhere quiet.
And walked in.
...
Amara’s assistant met me at the entrance, a broad stocky man with practiced politeness that didn’t quite reach his eyes.
"What took you so long? Come on. Makeup. Now."
"What kind of shoot is it today?" I asked as he hurried me down the hallway.
"Nothing special," he said quickly.
I nodded and said nothing.
I had done my research on the way over. It was the Lumière Étoile Jewelry shoot, the iconic French luxury house whose pieces had graced royalty for over a century. After this shoot Amara stood to sign on as their official global spokesperson. That was what was at stake. That was why Liam had been so desperate to get a body on that stage.
He had lied to me without blinking.
Had I always been this easy to deceive?
They sat me in front of the mirror and went to work. By the time they were finished I was in a white long fitted dress, simple and clean, a beautiful golden mask across my face, my hair swept back with a single white rose.
The assistant stared at my reflection and went quiet.
He then lifted the centerpiece of the entire show. The Lumière Étoile bracelet. A golden band with a crown of white diamonds at the center, two pure gemstone stars on either side like two parents holding a child between them. He carefully clasped it around my wrist.
It slid straight down my arm.
I was slimmer than Amara. The bracelet was far too big. With even the slightest movement it shifted and slipped completely off.
"There’s no way for you to wear it like this," the assistant said, his voice rising into full panic. "What do we do? What do we do? The mask for the shoot will cover your face, what do we do about your hands!"
"Do you trust me?" I asked.
He looked at me in the mirror. Desperate. Out of options. "At this moment I have no choice."
"Then leave it with me," I said.
He didn’t ask what I meant. He was too frightened to ask.
"Hurry. The photographer is ready"
In all the panic he didn’t notice the look in my eyes.
...
The studio was already buzzing when I walked in.
Big white walls, lighting rigs everywhere, a backdrop and about fifteen people moving around like they had somewhere more important to be. The photographer was already set up, snapping test shots, barking instructions at his assistants in rapid French mixed with English.
In the corner, quiet and watchful, stood a man I recognized immediately. Marcel Fontaine. Founder and creative director of Lumière Étoile. He was older, silver haired, with the kind of stillness that came from decades of knowing exactly what beauty looked like and exactly when he was not seeing it.
He glanced at me when I walked in.
I kept my eyes forward and said nothing.
The assistant rushed me to my position in front of the camera. The bracelet was already on my wrist, already sliding, already threatening to embarrass everyone in the room.
The photographer looked up from his camera. "Okay Amara, let’s start with the wrist shot. Hold it up for me."
I held up my wrist.
The bracelet slid to my elbow.
Dead silence.
The photographer lowered his camera slowly. The assistant made a sound like a small dying animal. Marcel Fontaine said nothing from his corner but I felt his eyes sharpen.
"It’s too big," someone whispered.
"Obviously it’s too big," someone else hissed back.
"Do you trust me?" I said to no one in particular.
Nobody answered. They were all too busy panicking.
I reached down, unclasped the bracelet and slid it carefully around my ankle instead. Then I looked back at the photographer, shifted my weight, lifted my leg slightly and held the pose.
The photographer stared.
Then he picked up his camera.
The first click came
Then the second
He moved around me fast, suddenly alive, suddenly interested in a way he hadn’t been thirty seconds ago. I gave him everything I had. Pose after pose, each one clean and deliberate, each one finding the light the way I had been doing since I was nineteen years old in a studio three times smaller than this one. The bracelet caught every angle, every flash, throwing diamonds back at the camera like it had been designed specifically for an ankle and not a wrist.
Maybe it had been.
Maybe nobody had figured that out until right now.
"Yes," the photographer kept saying under his breath. "Yes. Yes. That. Stay right there."
I stayed right there.
At some point the room had gone completely quiet except for the clicking of the camera and the soft instruction of the photographer. Even the assistants had stopped moving. Everyone was just watching.
I didn’t look at Marcel Fontaine.
But I knew he hadn’t taken his eyes off me once.
Then someone’s phone went off.
Then another.
Then three more in quick succession, that specific ripple that moves through a room when news breaks somewhere and starts spreading fast.
I kept my pose.
I heard the whispers start behind me. Urgent and confused and getting louder.
The photographer lowered his camera.
I finally turned around.
Marcel Fontaine was standing in the middle of the room with his phone in his hand, looking at the screen with an expression I could not quite read. Then he looked up at me. Slowly. Deliberately.
"It appears," he said, his French accent quiet and precise, "that Amara Chen was photographed at St Luke’s Hospital forty minutes ago." He tilted the phone toward the room so everyone could see the screen. Amara in a hospital bed, tubes in her arm, very clearly not standing in a photography studio in midtown Manhattan. "Which is quite interesting." His eyes stayed on me. "Given that she is also standing in front of my camera right now."
The room went very still.
Every single person turned to look at me.
I stood there in the white dress and the golden mask and felt that same thing move through me that I had felt walking out of Liam’s elevator three days ago. That cold deliberate settling. Like every warm thing stepping aside to make room for something sharper.
"If you are really Amara," Marcel said softly, "then take off the mask."
Nobody else spoke.
I reached up slowly toward the mask.
This, I thought, is where it begins.
