18
The moment Saoirse’s eyes landed on the message, her expression turned ice cold.
She barked at the bodyguards and kicked the door open, only to find the villa already emptied.
Miguel was gone.
At that moment, Miguel was at the yacht bar, drowning in liquor.
“Give me your strongest drink!”
His phone rang; Lori, his agent, flashed across the ‘screen.
“Miguel, are you out of your mind?! Do you even know how many paparazzi are filming you right now?!”
Miguel lazily tossed the empty glass aside. “I don’t want to be a celebrity anymore.”
Lori’s voice rose, sharp with fury. “And you think that’s fair to Belle?!”
She had once believed I had only walked away. But after learning of my death, the truth hit her like a slap.
Miguel’s voice sounded low and broken. “Lori, tell me, if I hadn’t stepped into the spotlight, would Belle have never left me?”
There was a long pause on the other end.
Then, in a voice colder than she had ever used with her artists, Lori spoke, “No. This is your
karma.”
She rarely loses her temper, especially when it is not like this.
‘Back then, Belle begged me to keep her secrets. But now that she’s gone, I won’t keep them anymore.”
“You’ve really lost your damn mind. Belle was a good girl, and you didn’t cherish her. The day you went public with Saoirse, Belle was stabbed three times by paparazzi just trying to stop them from leaking your bedroom photos!”
“She spent three months in the hospital, resuscitated again and again. Where were you then?” “And those job offers you bragged about? Do you think they came out of nowhere? It was Belle who begged, who knelt, who drank herself into a gastric hemorrhage just to win them for you. And where the hell were you then?”
Lori listed every wound, every sacrifice I had made over the past six years.
With each word, Miguel’s face turned a shade paler.
The wine glass slipped from his hand and crashed onto the table, splashing red across his clothes, yet he didn’t move.
His whole body trembled.
“Belle, she did all that for me…”
A broken sob finally tore from his throat.
“I’m sorry… Belle, I was wrong…”
Suddenly, his phone rang.
The screen lit up with an unfamiliar number.
He answered in a daze, and a rushed voice burst through the speaker. “Mr. Atkinson, you need to come back right now. Miss Pearson is in trouble!”
