13 years after our divorce, I met my ex-husband and his mistress’s son at an intellectual contest. He yelled: “how dare you come here!” But when my twins stepped up to get the gold medals, they turned purple…
“And now,” the host’s voice trembled with genuine excitement, “the Grand Prize for the most outstanding minds of this year’s tournament, achieving a perfect, unblemished score never before seen in our history: Congratulations to the twin brothers… Leo Holloway and Ethan Holloway!”
The auditorium exploded, but all I could hear was the rushing of my own blood. From the illuminated row, two teenage boys stepped out. The giant LED screens instantly projected their faces in hyper-crisp definition.
I stopped breathing.
I was looking at ghosts. The high, aristocratic bridge of the nose. The sharp, angular jawline. They were perfect, living molds of me at thirteen years old. But their eyes—dark, profound, and terrifyingly calm—were all Elena, the woman I had ruthlessly abandoned thirteen years ago when she was pregnant.
“Holloway,” the host repeated. Her maiden name.
“What is this?” Victoria, my billionaire wife, shrieked, jumping to her feet and shattering the decorum. “This is a mistake! Where is Preston’s name?”
At that moment, the screen flashed the lowest-tier consolation list. The name of Preston—her son, entirely propped up by my money—sat dead last at the bottom.
“This is rigged!” Victoria screamed, slamming her hands against the velvet railing. “I paid top dollar! How does my son lose to two fatherless nobodies?!”
Crushed by the sheer magnitude of the truth, I looked at Victoria’s distorted, ugly face, then back at the stage where my flesh and blood stood like conquering kings. The brilliance I had thrown away to buy this gilded cage was suffocating me.
“Julian, do something!” Victoria grabbed my lapel, her nails digging into the silk. “You are the primary sponsor! Demand a recount! Crush those kids!”
With terrifying speed, I grabbed her wrist and peeled her hand off me. I leaned in, my voice dropping to a register of cold, absolute menace I hadn’t used in a decade.
“Shut your mouth, Victoria. Shut it right now, or I swear to God I will dismantle your entire life before we reach the parking lot.”
She froze, her eyes wide with sudden, primal fear.
I stood up, my ridiculously expensive suit suddenly feeling like a straitjacket. Turning my back on my furious wife and the wreckage of her fake prestige, I stepped out into the aisle. I marched toward the stage.
Toward the reckoning I had dodged for thirteen years, completely unaware that in the opposite tier, a knowing, devastating smile had already set the trap for me…
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