Chapter 5 - The Mistress’s Price
While Richard was choking on his own arrogance downtown, Ivy Fontaine was discovering the precise value of a billionaire’s promises.
She sat in the cramped, noisy living room of her two-bedroom apartment in Montrose—an apartment she shared with a girl who worked in commercial real estate and never washed her dishes. Ivy had spent the last eight hours checking her phone every three minutes, expecting a call, a text, or an armed chauffeur sent by Richard to sweep her away to a suite at the St. Regis to shelter her from the storm.
Nothing had come.
Instead, at 11:30 AM, her phone rang with an incoming call from the managing partner of her PR firm.
She picked it up on the first ring, her heart fluttering. "Hello, Mr. Miller?"
"Ivy," the voice was clipped, brutally devoid of the warm, paternal tone Miller usually adopted. "Where are you right now?"
"I’m... I’m working from home this morning. I had a severe migraine after the Rivers closing event last night."
"Do not come into the office today," Miller said bluntly. "In fact, do not come into the office ever again. Your personal belongings will be couriered to your apartment by four o'clock."
Ivy shot up from her sofa, the blood draining from her face. "What? Mr. Miller, wait! Why? I’ve brought in three major accounts this quarter! I practically secured the Rivers media campaign single-handedly!"
"You compromised this entire firm, Ivy," Miller snarled, his anger cutting through the phone. "Rivers Global has just been served with a catastrophic fault divorce petition. The Vance Trust controls three of our largest institutional retainers. Eleanor Rivers’ attorneys called our senior board at ten o’clock. If you remain an employee of this firm for another sixty seconds, we lose eight million dollars in billings before noon."
"That’s unfair! Eleanor Rivers can't dictate who you employ!"
"She doesn't have to dictate anything. She pulled her family's business. That’s her right. And frankly, Ivy, sleeping with the client in his marital home during an active acquisition isn't just gross misconduct—it’s professional suicide. You’re radioactive in this city. Every PR and marketing agency from Houston to Dallas has already received word. You're done."
The line went dead.
Ivy stood there, trembling, clutching the phone to her ear while the dial tone hummed like a flatlining heartbeat.
"No," she whispered. "No, Richard will fix this. Richard has billions. Richard won't let her do this."
She grabbed her keys, threw on an expensive trench coat she had bought on credit last month assuming she would soon be the mistress of River Oaks, and ran out to her car.
Forty minutes later, she bypassed the executive security desk at Rivers Tower by flashing her temporary project badge before the guards received the updated restricted list. She rode the high-speed elevator to the sixty-second floor, her heels clicking aggressively against the marble.
She pushed past the executive receptionist, ignoring the woman’s frantic shouts, and barged straight into Richard’s corner office.
"Richard!" she cried out.
Richard was sitting behind his massive desk, his tie undone, the collar of his shirt damp with sweat. Three corporate defense attorneys were huddled around his desk, speaking in frantic, hushed tones over open laptops.
When Ivy burst into the room, Richard didn't look up with relief. He didn't look up with tenderness.
He looked at her with pure, unadulterated disgust.
"Who let this woman up here?" Richard roared, slamming his palms down on the desk.
Ivy froze, stunned. "Richard... it’s me. Miller fired me. Eleanor is destroying my life! She’s telling everyone what happened! You have to stop her. You have to tell them—"
"Shut up," Richard spat, stepping around his desk. He walked up to her, his face dark with fury, his eyes bloodshot. "Shut your mouth, Ivy."
"Richard—"
"You ruined me," he hissed, his voice trembling with a venom that made her take a step back toward the door. "Do you have any idea what you've done? The board is freezing my authority. The Singapore merger is falling apart. I have lost two hundred million dollars in market cap in four hours because of you!"
"Because of *me*?" Ivy’s voice turned high, hysterical. "You invited me to that house! You poured the scotch! You handed me that damn robe and told me your wife was a cold, frigid shell who didn't care about you anymore!"
"She is my wife!" Richard screamed, the sound echoing through the glass walls of the executive floor. "She built this company with me! And you were nothing! A cheap distraction! A mistake!"
Ivy felt as if she had been slapped across the face. The illusion of being the younger, prettier, more exciting replacement dissolved instantly into the harsh, fluorescent reality of corporate survival. She was nothing to him. She had never been anything to him. She was merely the match he had used to set his own empire on fire, and now he wanted to crush her under his boot to put out the blaze.
"You coward," she breathed, tears of humiliation finally spilling over her cheeks. "You pathetic coward."
"Get her out of here," Richard ordered his security chief, who had just rushed into the room. "Revoke her badge. If she steps foot on any Rivers property again, have her arrested for trespassing."
Two heavy hands clamped onto Ivy’s shoulders, dragging her backward out of the office.
May you like
As the mahogany doors slammed shut in her face, she heard Richard shouting at his lawyers, demanding to know how much cash he could liquidate before the court injunction locked down his private accounts.
***
