Divorcing My Cheating Husband

His fingers were still moving when I bit down.

Not a warning nip. Not a flinch. I sank my teeth into his wrist with everything I had, felt the skin give, tasted copper, and held on until he made a sound I'd never heard from Kade Mills before.

Pain.

His grip vanished instantly. He stumbled back a half-step, and the spell broke.

I shoved off the window and put three feet of space between us before he could recover. The room had gone completely silent—not the polite, expectant silence from before, but the stunned, airless kind. Seventy men staring at the blood welling up on Kade's wrist, then back at me.

I raised the back of my hand and wiped my mouth slowly, deliberately, my eyes never leaving his. The smear of red against my knuckles felt like a signature.

His face was a mask of pure disbelief. Kade Mills, who had crushed competitors, buried lawsuits, and made city councilmen cry in private—standing there cradling his wrist like a wounded animal, unable to process that I had done this. That I had dared.

"Ivy." My name came out low and fractured, stripped of its usual command.

I said nothing. I picked up my clutch from the floor where it had fallen and walked toward the exit. My heels clicked against the hardwood in the silence, each step louder than it should have been.

Behind me, I heard him recover.

"Stop her."

No one moved. Maybe they were still in shock. Maybe, just this once, even these men recognized something feral and untouchable in the way I was walking.

I pushed through the mahogany doors without looking back.

---

The elevator ride down forty floors felt like descending through water. My reflection in the polished steel doors looked foreign to me—torn fabric, bare shoulders, a smudge of lipstick at the corner of my mouth. I pressed the heel of my palm against my sternum and breathed.

My phone buzzed before I hit the lobby.

I didn't need to look at the screen to know it was him.

The second buzz came as I stepped out onto Fifth Avenue, the cold November air hitting my exposed skin like a slap. Then a third. I finally glanced down.

Not Kade. His assistant, Marcus.

The message was three words: *Check your email.*

I didn't stop walking, but I opened it. One new message, sent from Kade's corporate account forty seconds ago, forwarded to the hospital's billing department, his accountant, and his personal attorney.

*Effective immediately, terminate all financial arrangements associated with the account of Margaret Cole. No further payments are to be processed.*

Margaret Cole. My mother's name.

I read it twice. Then I put my phone in my clutch and kept walking.

He didn't know. That was the thing about Kade—he was brilliant at weaponizing pain, but only the pain he knew about. He had no idea that those checks had been covering a hospital room where no one was breathing anymore. That the woman he thought he was condemning to death had already gone, quietly, on a Tuesday morning two weeks ago, while I stood in a receiving line at his foundation gala and shook hands with strangers.

His threat landed in an empty room.

I should have felt something like triumph. Instead, I just felt the cold.

---

My apartment was a forty-minute subway ride and a different universe from the Meridian Club. The building had water stains on the ceiling of the lobby and a buzzer that only worked if you held it down for three full seconds. I'd moved here six months ago, quietly, when I'd first started planning. Kade thought I stayed in his penthouse every night he was traveling. He'd never bothered to check.

I'd barely gotten my coat off when my phone rang.

Not a text this time. A call. The contact name read *Dad*, though the word had never felt accurate. I let it ring four times, staring at it, before I picked up.

"You stupid girl." His voice was already thick, the particular slur that meant he was three drinks in at minimum. "Do you have any idea what you just did? He called me. Kade Mills called me personally to tell me my daughter has lost her mind."

"Hello to you too, Frank."

"Don't you take that tone with me. That man was our meal ticket. You think I don't know how much he's been putting into that account every month? You think I don't—"

"He's not putting anything into any account anymore," I said. "We're done. I filed the papers tonight."

The silence on the other end lasted exactly two seconds.

Then he exploded.

I held the phone away from my ear and let him go. The words washed over me in a familiar tide—*ungrateful, selfish, just like your mother, threw away everything*—and I waited for it to crest and break. It always did.

When he finally ran out of breath, I said, "I need Mom's ashes. The necklace she left me. I'm coming to get it."

"You're not getting a damn thing from this house until you fix what you broke."

"It's her ashes, Frank."

"It's in my house. Which means it's mine until you—"

I hung up.

I sat on the edge of my bed for a long moment, looking at the water-stained ceiling. The necklace was a small glass vial on a thin gold chain, the kind they make from cremated remains. Mom had asked me to have it made before she got too sick to ask for things. She'd wanted me to have something to hold onto.

I wasn't leaving it in that apartment.

---

The cab ride to the Bronx took twenty-five minutes. The building where I grew up looked smaller every time I came back, the brick darker, the fire escapes rustier. I'd spent years trying to escape the gravity of this place. Some nights I could still feel it pulling.

I paid the driver and stood on the sidewalk for a moment, looking up at the third-floor window. The light was on. Of course it was.

I took the stairs. The elevator had been broken since 2019 and no one had ever fixed it.

I was raising my hand to knock when the door swung open from the inside.

I had just enough time to register the shape of the bottle—bourbon, mostly empty—before it shattered against the doorframe six inches from my face.

Glass exploded outward. A shard caught my cheek. I felt the sting before I fully understood what had happened.

"You have the nerve to show up here?" Frank's silhouette filled the doorway, backlit by the yellow kitchen light, his face twisted into something I'd spent my whole childhood learning to read and fear. "After what you pulled tonight? You ruined everything. Everything!"

The smell of bourbon mixed with old cigarette smoke rolled out of the apartment in a wave.

I pressed two fingers to my cheek and felt the wet warmth there.

I didn't step back.