She'd been seventeen. He had guided her through her first financial report, taught her how to negotiate, taught her how to stand her ground in a world that devoured the weak.
He had been her first love. In the end, it simply faded away—no dramatic ending, just silence.
But the gallery wasn't precious because of him.
It was precious because of everything she'd built between seventeen and twenty-seven, piece by painstaking piece. Her empire, assembled one brick at a time.
It was her lifeblood. Her proof of existence in this world—a flame that would never go out.
She had believed, once, that Ivor understood that.
She never imagined he would take her ambition and her pride and weaponize them—a gift to appease another woman, a blade turned against herself.
Jocelyn's fists twisted into the bedsheets until her knuckles went white. Her voice trembled. "I will never sign that over to you."
Ivor, hearing this, grew eerily calm. A faint smile even tugged at the corner of his mouth—as though her fury were nothing more than a pet baring its teeth.
"You won't sign? That's fine. I was only informing you as a courtesy."
"While you were lying unconscious in this bed, I already lifted your fingerprints. The transfer paperwork for the gallery should be going into effect any minute now."
He leaned in close. A vein pulsed at his temple. "You knew this the day you married me, Jocelyn. When I want something, I get it. Always."
Something detonated inside her skull. Without thinking, she grabbed the glass from the bedside table and hurled it at his face.
Glass shattered with a bright, clean crack. Blood traced a slow line down from Ivor's brow. He didn't flinch. Didn't step back. He let the blood smear across half his vision and advanced on the bed, step by deliberate step.
"Neither you nor Nellie will ever be allowed to leave my side."
He turned and slammed the door behind him.
Jocelyn stared at his retreating figure and remembered the first time she'd met him. Back then, he'd been the Sanchez family's unremarkable second son—an older brother above him whose brilliance cast a long shadow, branch families circling below like wolves. He was trapped in the middle, belonging nowhere.
In those days, when people in Harbor City spoke of the Sanchez family, they knew the eldest son. Nobody knew Ivor.
But he had clawed his way forward through sheer ruthlessness, tearing open a path by force.