Page 21 of Fallen Empire

At some point, the steam had vanished from the mirror, and warmth slid down the drain like everything else I’d been holding in. Still, I didn’t move.

My fingers had pruned. My skin had numbed. But the ache in my chest? That was still there—alive and relentless.

Ben’s voice echoed through my mind. “You slammed the door and never gave me a chance to figure out what the hell happened.”

I didn’t want those words to stick. But they did.

He hadn’t said it with blame. He said it like a man still standing in the doorway I’d locked him out of, waiting to be let back in.

And that part of me—the one that wanted to open it again? It was louder than it had been in years.

Not because I needed rescuing. But because I was exhausted. Tired of pretending that I hadn’t already built my entire identity around surviving.

I’d spent so long holding things together, I didn’t even know what it would feel like to let someone hold me.

My early teenage life was a textbook mess no one ever got to read.

My mother didn’t leave quietly. She detonated mine and my father’s lives and walked away without flinching. She’d cheated, burned him to the ground, and didn’t look back.

He started drinking the day she left and never really stopped. Night after night, I watched the man who used to carry me on his shoulders drown in bourbon and shame. He was a powerhouse in the boardroom by day, and a ghost of himself by night.

And me?

I didn’t get to unravel. I didn’t get to fall apart.

I became the shield. The face. The fixer.

I stepped in and made sure no one ever knew how broken we were behind closed doors. Every contract saved, every whisper silenced, every PR headline spun with a smile—that was me.

Millicent Pierman, the woman who could handle anything.

But no one ever asked who handled me.

That was the legacy I built. Not just for my father's company, but for myself. And now, I was beginning to question if that legacy had cost me more than I ever admitted.

Because that vault where I stored all the pain—my mother’s betrayal, my father’s downfall, the man I once loved who died before I could say goodbye—it wasn’t sealed as tightly as it used to be. It was bleeding at the edges.

Savannah—my mirror, my anchor, the one person who never asked me to be anything but exactly who I was—was fighting for her life.

And I was supposed to be strong.

But I didn’t feel strong.

I felt like a fraud.

A hollow, lonely fraud wearing heels and war paint and hoping no one noticed the cracks underneath.

God, I wanted to tell her everything. Every part of me I’d buried so deep I forgot it was still alive. She deserved that. We both did.

We said we’d always be honest. Always share the hard parts.

But I’d spent years hiding mine, and now I didn’t even know where to begin.

Still... if I told anyone, it would be her.

And maybe—just maybe—after that, I could find the courage to tell Ben.

Because something was blooming in me. Something fragile. Something terrifying.