The air conditioning in the Hotel Casagre ran with a steady hum, but to Miles Carter, it sounded like a warning siren. He adjusted his Italian silk tie again and again, until the fabric felt less like luxury and more like a loop tightening around his throat. On his phone, one message kept glowing like it owned the room. He couldn’t make himself look away.From the tenth floor, the city below looked alive and careless. In the hotel’s garden, everything was arranged to impress: arches of imported white flowers, gold chairs lined up with military precision, and more than two hundred guests dressed like power itself. The governor was there. His Silicon Valley partners were there, too—along with his mother, Dolores Carter, waiting to watch her son “win” at the one thing he hadn’t locked down yet.

The text was short, clean, and final.“I can’t do it, Miles. I’m sorry. I don’t love you enough to pretend for a lifetime. I’m already at the airport. Don’t look for me.”Isabella Grant—perfect on paper, perfect for cameras—had disappeared sixty minutes before the vows.Two years of a relationship built on quiet expectations, six months of a high-profile engagement, and a fortune spent on the wedding of the year had just collapsed into a single message.Miles’s knees gave out, and he sank onto the edge of the king-size bed. His mind went strangely blank. It wasn’t heartbreak that crushed him—it was humiliation, sharp and immediate.He’d built his tech empire at twenty-five. He’d negotiated million-dollar mergers without blinking. Now he could already hear the whispers, see the gossip headlines, feel his mother’s look before she even spoke.