CHAPTER 9
Grant looked up at the camera feed, his eyes widening in shock as he spotted Claire sitting comfortably beside Mateo in the luxurious Malibu living room.
"Claire!" Grant screamed through the speaker, his voice filled with a pathetic mixture of desperation, rage, and groveling regret. "Claire, please! You have to talk to the prosecutors! Tell them it was all my mother's idea! Tell them I was forced into it!"
Claire looked at her ex-husband on the screen, feeling zero anger, zero fear, and zero regret—only a profound, distant pity for the man who had destroyed himself.
"You made your choices, Grant," Claire said evenly, her voice steady and filled with absolute, unshakeable power. "You thought I was weak because I was quiet. You forgot that quiet people observe everything."
"I'm going to die in here, Claire!" Grant wept, pressing his hands against the glass. "They took the Bel-Air house! They took my accounts! I have nothing left!"
"You have thirty years to think about what you did to me on that kitchen floor," Mateo interrupted coldly, stepping into the camera frame and wrapping his arm around Claire’s shoulders.
Grant stared at Mateo, then at the massive diamond ring sparkling on Claire’s finger—a ring Mateo had custom-designed to replace the one Grant had let fall on the marble.
"She is mine now, Grant," Mateo declared with absolute finality. "And your son will grow up calling a real man his father."
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Mateo tapped the screen, severing the connection forever and erasing the ghost of Grant Whitmore from their lives completely.
Claire turned toward Mateo, wrapping her arms around his neck and pulling him down for a deep, passionate kiss that sealed their bright new future together.
