"That's mine! It's my premarital asset. What gives you the right to hand my property to someone else?"
The calm mask on Ivor's face cracked apart, revealing the darkness coiled beneath.
"What gives me the right? The fact that you're my wife." His eyes narrowed. "All that talk about finding other men—you were testing me, weren't you?"
"All these years, and you still can't forget him. Why else would you guard this gallery he gave you so fiercely that I can't so much as touch it?"
Pain lanced through Jocelyn's chest. The man in front of her grew more irrational by the second.
She'd been seventeen. He had guided her through her first financial report, taught her how to negotiate, taught her how to stand her ground in a world that devoured the weak.
He had been her first love. In the end, it simply faded away—no dramatic ending, just silence.
But the gallery wasn't precious because of him.
It was precious because of everything she'd built between seventeen and twenty-seven, piece by painstaking piece. Her empire, assembled one brick at a time.
It was her lifeblood. Her proof of existence in this world—a flame that would never go out.
She had believed, once, that Ivor understood that.