Seraphina Hale, 27, founder and CEO of Hale Lumina Design, was found dead in her Athena apartment early this morning in what police are calling an apparent suicide. The jewelry heiress was discovered by her executive assistant after failing to show up for scheduled morning meetings.
Sources say Hale had been struggling with depression following a highly publicized incident at a family event days ago, where she was caught on camera assaulting her sister's fiancé. The incident sparked a widespread boycott of her jewelry brand and caused significant damage to both her reputation and her company's financial standing.
Police found a suicide note at the scene. The family has released a statement asking for privacy during this difficult time.
The phone slipped from his hand.
Clattered against the mahogany desk.
The sound echoed in the sudden, absolute silence that had descended over his office like a funeral shroud.
No.
The thought cut through the numbness like a blade made of ice, sharp and brutal and completely unaccepting of reality.
No. No. No. No. No.
Alexander stared at the article still glowing on his phone screen. Read it again. And again. And again. As if the words would somehow rearrange themselves into a different configuration, a different meaning, a different reality where Seraphina was still alive and he still had a chance.
The words didn't change.
They never changed.
Found dead.
Apparent suicide.
Family asks for privacy.
His chest felt tight, like someone had wrapped steel bands around his ribs and was slowly, methodically, squeezing with inhuman strength. Each breath became harder than the last, his lungs refusing to expand properly, his heart hammering against his sternum in a rhythm that felt wrong.
Too fast.
Too hard.
Like it was trying to beat its way out of his chest and stop entirely all at once.
He couldn't breathe.
Couldn't think.
Couldn't do anything except stare at those words that refused to make sense, that described an impossible reality he wasn't equipped to process.
Seraphina Hale found dead.
The girl with the sweet brown eyes that had seen him as more than his father, more than his poverty, more than the bastard scholarship kid everyone else looked through like he was made of glass.
The one who'd smiled at him in the library fourteen years ago and made him believe, just for a moment, that someone like him could deserve something good, something pure, something beautiful.
The one he'd spent fourteen years loving from a distance, too afraid to reach out, too convinced he wasn't worthy, too trapped by his own cowardice to take the chance he should have taken a thousand times.
The one he'd been planning to propose to in the next few days, finally brave enough to close the distance, finally ready to risk rejection for the chance at something real.
Dead.
The word was impossible. Obscene. It didn't fit in the same universe as Seraphina Hale, didn't belong anywhere near her name.
She was light and life and fierce determination wrapped in human form. She built empires from nothing. She created beauty that made people stop and stare. She moved through the world like she was made of pure forward momentum, unstoppable and brilliant and so vibrantly alive it hurt to look at her sometimes.
She couldn't be dead.
Dead was for other people. Dead was for the weak and the unlucky and the ones who gave up when things got hard.
Seraphina couldn't give up.
Never.
But the article was still there. Still glowing on his screen. Still real no matter how many times he blinked or how hard he tried to wish it away into the nightmare it had to be.
Alexander stood up slowly, his legs feeling strange and disconnected from his body, like he was piloting a machine that no longer responded properly to commands. He walked to the window on autopilot, his feet carrying him forward without conscious thought, and looked out at the city sprawled beneath him—the kingdom he'd conquered over ten years of ruthless ambition, the empire he'd built stone by bloody stone, all of it meaningless now.
She was supposed to be down there somewhere.
In her office at Hale Lumina, probably staying late like she always did, designing her next collection with that intense focus that made her forget to eat or sleep. Fighting her battles with the board and the suppliers and the retailers who underestimated her. Proving everyone wrong who'd ever doubted she could build something real.
Living.
His reflection stared back at him from the window glass, superimposed over the city like a ghost. He looked normal. Suit still pressed and perfect. Hair still neat. Face still composed in that mask of cold competence he'd worn for so long it had become his actual face.
How could he look normal when the entire world had just ended?
How could he appear unchanged when everything inside him had been torn out and burned to ash?
A sound escaped his throat.
Soft at first, barely audible, just a small exhalation of pain.
Then louder.
Then louder still.
Building and building until it erupted into a roar of pure anguish that shattered the professional silence of his office, a sound he didn't recognize as coming from himself, something primal and broken and utterly inhuman.
His fist went through the glass.
Glass exploded outward and inward in a glittering cascade, razor-sharp fragments catching the afternoon light like scattered diamonds. Blood sprayed across his desk in an arterial pattern. Pain lanced up his arm—distant, irrelevant, nothing compared to the howling void opening up inside his chest like a black hole devouring everything he was.
The sweet brown eyes he'd never see again.
The gentle smile that had made him believe he could be worthy of something good.
The girl who'd treated him kindly when no one else had.
Gone.
Not enough.
It would never be enough.
No amount of destruction could match the devastation inside him.
He grabbed the leather chair and hurled it through the table. More glass. More destruction.
His hands were bleeding freely now. Glass embedded in his knuckles. Blood dripping onto the floor in steady rhythm.
He couldn't feel it.
Couldn't feel anything except the crushing realization that was slowly, inexorably, destroying him from the inside out:
He'd waited too long.
Fourteen years of watching from a distance like a coward. Fourteen years of telling himself he wasn't good enough, that she deserved better, that he needed more time to become someone worthy of her love.
And now she was gone.
The life he'd imagined—standing beside her, protecting her, loving her—would never exist.
Because he'd waited.
And while he was waiting, building his courage one painful day at a time, someone had killed her.
Someone had killed her.
The thought cut through the grief like ice water, shocking and clarifying.
Alexander went very still in the center of his destroyed office, surrounded by wreckage and blood and broken glass.
The article said suicide. Depression. A note confessing guilt and despair.
But Seraphina didn't get depressed and give up. That wasn't who she was, wasn't in her nature.
She got angry when challenged. She got determined when people doubted her. She fought back with everything she had.
She'd been building empires since she was twenty years old. She'd weathered her parents' brutal divorce. She'd endured her mother's favoritism. She'd survived society's expectations. She'd built Hale Lumina from nothing while everyone waited for her to fail.
A public slap and some bad press wouldn't break someone like that.
Someone had killed her.
And made it look like suicide.
Alexander walked slowly back to his desk, glass crunching under his shoes with sounds like bones breaking. His phone lay face-up, still displaying the article.
He picked it up with bloodied, shaking hands.
Called Marcus.
"Sir?"
"Seraphina Hale." His voice sounded strange to his own ears. Flat. Empty. "I need everything. Police reports. Autopsy results. Crime scene photos. Security footage. Everything."
Silence. Then, carefully: "Sir... I'm so sorry. I know you—"
"Everything, Marcus." Ice crept into Alexander's voice. "I don't care what it costs. I don't care what laws you have to break. I want to know who killed her."
"Sir, the police ruled it suicide—"
"Then the police are wrong. Or they're being paid to be wrong." His voice dropped to something cold and deadly. "Either way, I want the truth. Can you get it for me?"
A pause, heavy with understanding.
"Yes, sir. I'll have something by tonight."
"Good."
Alexander ended the call.
The old Alexander died in that moment.
The boy who'd blushed in the library. The young man who'd dreamed of being worthy of her. The CEO who'd believed in doing things the right way.
All of it—gone.
Burned away in the fire of her death.
What rose in its place was something darker. Something that understood that the right way got you nothing except regret and an engagement ring that would never be worn.
Ever Again... Because he lived on without her.
Forever... At least in this universe.