The atmosphere at the gala was suffocatingly perfect—perfect enough to make Maximus Anderson forget why he had fled to London in the first place.

Escape. That was the only word for it. An escape from Delilah Kelly, an escape from the jagged, freezing truth.

Days ago, after confronting Delilah, the reality still felt like a sick joke. He had tasked his men with digging into her recent movements. The Anderson Group was expanding rapidly, easily crushing the opposition from the Harrison and Hughes conglomerates, and his parents were finally enjoying their retirement in peace. A new prodigy had risen in the business world, securing his legacy. But with that success came the cold, hard data he’d been dreading.

The file they handed him dismantled every memory he held of their past.

The report was simple, clinical, and devastating: Delilah was four months pregnant, not three as she had claimed.

Maximus remembered clearly. There was only one night—a candlelit dinner—where they had been intimate.

Rage, white-hot and blinding, consumed him. He threw the report against the wall with such force that the binder cracked. Needing absolute, damning proof, he went to the hospital himself. A doctor, eyes darting nervously as he weighed the heavy bribe in his pocket, finally spilled the secret: Delilah had been a month pregnant before that night even happened.

And during that specific window of time? Maximus had been drowning in corporate logistics, hadn't touched another woman, and hadn't been with her.

The realization left him hollow.

Years ago, after Theodore Anderson cut off his funding and dragged him back from a life of playing piano to force him into the family business, Maximus had been a shell of a man. He had no interest in managing a corporate empire, but his mother’s health had been the leverage. She had used her own life as a bargaining chip, and he’d caved.

Broken and adrift, he spent his nights drinking his sorrows away at The Gilded Lounge.

That was where he’d stumbled into Delilah. He’d picked a fight while drunk and had been beaten half to death behind the building. It was Delilah who saved him, tending to his wounds with a softness that felt like salvation. She’d whispered that she’d watched him from afar for years, that she’d loved him long before he ever noticed her.

They became inseparable. He brought her home, but Theodore wouldn't hear of it, barking that the girl was trouble. Like a man blinded by a fever dream, Maximus defied his father, forcing their romance into the shadows.

Then came the setup. The forced marriage to Rose Harrison.

He had sworn to Delilah that Rose was nothing more than a status symbol, a legal formality. He vowed that he would never betray her. He threw himself into the company, turning the Anderson Group into a juggernaut to prove his worth, all while keeping Delilah as his secret heart.

But it was Delilah who had betrayed him.

He’d thought the child she carried was their love made flesh. He’d even raised a hand against a woman for the first time in his life over the pain of losing that baby—a moment of grief that still haunted him. He’d laid a small plot to rest in a cemetery on the outskirts of the city, mourning a life that never was.

Now, the truth made the tragedy feel like a pathetic farce. All his sacrifices, all his bitterness—for what?

Maximus’s dark eyes brimmed with an agonizing sorrow. His heart felt like a ruin, a landscape of splintered glass. Even as he drank, the pain didn't numb; it sharpened. He had to ask himself: was love nothing more than a casualty of time?

He had fled China in a panic, seeking refuge in the one place he had once felt at peace: London.

The moment he arrived, the royal household had reached out, desperate to have him at the Queen’s gala. And that was where he found Rose Harrison.

As the orchestra struck up "Für Elise," the melody pulled the memories of every encounter he’d had with Rose into focus.

He remembered her eyes—stubborn, haunted, demanding to know why he refused to believe her, why he refused to love her.

Deep in the silence of his own mind, he asked the question he had suppressed for so long: Was Rose Harrison the rose blooming behind the window God had finally opened for him?