Chapter 319

Chapter 319:

“I’m not going far,” Camille assured her. “Just to the garden downstairs. I need to… process this.”

Alexander moved to follow her, but Victoria caught his sleeve.

“Let her go,” she said quietly. “She needs space to find her own way through this.”

After Camille left, Victoria’s composed expression finally cracked, revealing the worry beneath.

“She’s struggling with her promise to me,” Victoria said. “The promise to choose life over revenge.”

“It’s a lot to ask,” Alexander replied, taking the seat Camille had vacated. “Especially now, with proof of what Rose did. With the knowledge that Rose was planning even more attacks.”

“It’s precisely because of that proof that the promise matters,” Victoria countered. “Rose wants Camille consumed by hatred. Wants her focused on destruction rather than creation. If Camille gives in to that, Rose wins, even if she’s caught and punished.”

Alexander couldn’t argue with Victoria’s logic, but he understood Camille’s conflict all too well. “What can I do to help her?”

Victoria’s eyes, still sharp despite her illness, fixed on his. “Remind her who she is now. Not who she was when Rose first hurt her. The woman she’s become is stronger than her anger. She just needs to remember that.”

In the hospital garden, Camille sat on a stone bench, her face turned up to the afternoon sun. The images from the security footage played on loop in her mind—Rose moving through the hotel, planting death with the same casual confidence she had once used to steal Camille’s husband, her family, her sense of self.

Always Rose, destroying what Camille had built. Always Rose, turning triumph to ash.

Camille’s phone buzzed in her pocket. A news alert. She opened it to see Rose’s face filling the screen, a still from the security footage, alongside the headline: “FBI LAUNCHES NATIONWIDE MANHUNT FOR GRAND PLAZA HOTEL BOMBER.”

Beneath it, details of the attack. The death toll. The injured. A brief biography of Rose Lewis, adopted sister of Camille Kane, with mentions of her “apparent vendetta” against the Kane family.

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Now everyone would know. The story Camille had kept private for so long—her sister’s betrayal, her husband’s infidelity, her own transformation from victim to survivor—was now playing out in public headlines.

She closed the news app and opened her photo gallery instead, scrolling to an image she had taken just weeks ago: the Phoenix Foundation’s logo, freshly painted on the wall of their new office. A symbol of rebirth. Of rising from destruction.

Victoria’s words echoed in her mind: “Promise me you’ll live for creation, not destruction.”

Camille had made that promise in a moment of emotional vulnerability, desperate to give Victoria peace. Now, faced with undeniable evidence of Rose’s crimes, that promise felt harder to keep. The anger burning inside her demanded action, satisfaction, justice.

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