Chapter 8: Collateral Damage

If Ethan’s revenge was a targeted explosion, the shockwave had two epicenters. While one was tearing through Isabella’s life, the other, traveling at the same impossible speed, slammed into the gilded world of Julian Vance.

Amelia Vance, née Harrison, sat in the sun-drenched morning room of her father’s Greenwich estate. The room, decorated in shades of cream and soft gold, was a temple of old money tranquility. Outside, prize-winning roses bloomed in a meticulously kept garden. Inside, Amelia stared at the screen of her phone, her posture as rigid and perfect as the porcelain teacup cooling beside her untouched hand. Her face, usually a mask of polite, aristocratic calm, was a stony tableau of utter stillness.

She wasn’t crying. The Harrisons did not cry; they consolidated. She had scrolled through the entirety of The Isabella Chronicle once, with a clinical detachment that would have terrified a lesser man. She read the texts, her husband’s flirtatious banter a vulgar stain on her screen. She saw the photos, the stolen moments of cheap intimacy.

But it was the audio file that broke through her icy composure, not with tears, but with a cold, clarifying rage that settled deep in her marrow. She put the phone to her ear, turning the volume down so only she could hear Isabella’s purring voice, followed by her husband’s smug laugh.

“And Ethan? What does he know?”

“Oh, Ethan… A walking, talking bank account with a decent algorithm…”

Amelia’s eyes closed for a single, long moment. The insult was not just that her husband was a cheat. It was that he and his lover shared a language of contempt. They saw their spouses not as partners, but as obstacles, as utilities. In their private world, she was just the other half of the equation, the boring, stable wife with the powerful father—the Amelia algorithm. The realization was a shard of ice in her heart.

She opened her eyes, the blue in them now as hard and cold as a winter sky. She placed the phone face down on the polished mahogany table with a soft, definitive click. She picked up her teacup, her hand perfectly steady, and took a slow, deliberate sip. The tea was cold. She set it back in its saucer, then picked up her phone again, her movements economical and precise. She dialed a single number from her favorites.

“Father,” she said when the call was answered, her voice betraying nothing, a perfect, crystalline calm. “I need you to come home. Julian has become… a public embarrassment. It’s done. Handle it.”

She ended the call without waiting for a reply. She knew none was needed. The Harrison family machinery, infinitely more powerful and ruthless than any corporation, was now turning its gears against the man who had disgraced their name.

---

Miles away, in a glass-and-steel tower in midtown Manhattan, the emergency meeting was already underway. The seven senior partners of Vance & Associates sat around a twenty-foot obsidian table, the mood as grim and heavy as a tomb. Each of them had a firm-issued tablet in front of them, all displaying the same stark, white webpage.

“The link was sent to every managing director, our top ten clients, and, God help us, the entire team at Blackwood Capital,” said Marcus Davies, the firm’s silver-haired, iron-willed CEO. He pinched the bridge of his nose, a rare crack in his stoic facade. “We are a company built on discretion and trust. This… this is a digital atom bomb.”

One of the partners scrolled through the ‘Correspondence’ section. “The timestamps are damning. He was texting her during the quarterly earnings call. From this very room.”

“Forget the affair,” another partner, a sharp-eyed woman named Clara Stein, cut in. “That’s an HR problem. This is a security and judgment problem. Julian Vance, our head of acquisitions, the man we trust with billions of dollars in sensitive negotiations, was compromised. His entire digital life, our firm’s name, has been splayed out for the world to see by some tech nerd he apparently decided to cuckold.”

The words hung in the air, blunt and brutal. Julian wasn’t just an adulterer; he was a liability. He had exposed them all.

Davies nodded slowly, his face set like granite. “He made us vulnerable. The morality clause in his contract is unambiguous. The reputational risk is catastrophic. We need to cut the limb off before the rot spreads.” He looked around the table, meeting each partner’s gaze. There were no dissenters. In the cold calculus of high finance, there was no room for loyalty to a man who had become toxic.

“Have HR send the email,” Davies commanded, his voice leaving no room for argument. “Suspension, effective immediately, pending a full investigation. Freeze his access to all firm systems. I’ll call his father-in-law personally… though I suspect he’s already heard.”

---

Julian Vance, blissfully unaware, had just stepped out of the shower in his palatial Upper East Side apartment. He felt like the king of the world, still buzzing from the illicit thrill of his late-night call with Isabella. He wrapped a towel around his waist, admiring his reflection in the fog-free mirror, the smug, confident smile of a man who believed he could have it all.

Then his phone began to vibrate on the marble countertop. And it didn’t stop.

It was a frantic, relentless buzzing, a swarm of notifications arriving all at once. Puzzled, he picked it up. The lock screen was a chaotic mess of text previews and email alerts. He swiped it open, his smile faltering.

The first was a text from a colleague: What the HELL is this, Julian? It contained a link.

He tapped it. The page loaded. The Isabella Chronicle.

The blood drained from his face. His confident smile dissolved into a mask of slack-jawed horror. It was all there. Everything. His words. Her pictures. Their entire secret world, curated and displayed like a grotesque art installation. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic, trapped bird. How? Who?

The answer came as he scrolled, his hands starting to shake. The mocking, clinical tone. The technical precision of it. It had to be the husband. The quiet, boring coder. The non-threat.

The phone vibrated again in his hand, this time a call. ISABELLA. He answered, desperate. “Bella? What the hell is happening?”

He was met with the sound of her ragged, hysterical sobbing. “He did it, Julian! The psycho did it! He sent it to everyone! My mother… the gallery… everyone!”

Before he could respond, another call came through, overriding hers. The caller ID made his stomach clench into a knot of pure ice. DAVID HARRISON. His father-in-law. He let Isabella’s call drop.

“Sir?” he answered, his voice a pathetic croak.

“My office,” the old man’s voice was a low, dangerous rumble, the sound of an impending earthquake. “One hour. And Julian? Don’t bother bringing a lawyer. Bring a box for your desk.” The line went dead.

A new email notification popped up at the top of his screen. The subject line was cold and corporate. From: Human Resources. Subject: Formal Notice of Suspension.

Julian stared at his reflection. The golden boy was gone. In his place was a pale, terrified man, dripping water onto a thousand-dollar bathmat, his perfect life imploding in real-time on a 6-inch screen. The arrogant lover, the master of the universe, had been brought to his knees. Not by a confrontation, but by a cascade of data. The unseen, disrespected husband hadn't just gotten even. He had salted the earth.