His Dangerous Love On Ice (Olivia and Zane) novel Chapter 152

Olive’s POV

I made it to my car before the tears started.

Sat there in the Mercer Company parking garage with my hands gripping the steering wheel so tight my knuckles went white, trying to breathe through the tightness in my chest that felt like someone had wrapped barbed wire around my lungs and was pulling it tighter with every second that passed.

Sophia’s words kept echoing in my head, playing on repeat like some fucked-up mantra I couldn’t escape.

You’re nothing. This won’t last. It’s all about to come crashing down.

And the worst part—the absolute worst fucking part—was that I believed her, because deep down I’d always known I didn’t belong in this world of corporate warfare and billion-dollar campaigns and people who weaponized murder accusations like they were discussing something random.

My phone buzzed in my bag and I grabbed it with shaking hands expecting another passive-aggressive text from Brenda or maybe Jessica checking if I was okay after that disaster of a meeting,

Instead, it was my mother.

Mom: Peach, I need to talk to you. Please call me when you can. It’s important.

The phone started ringing before I could even process the message, my mother’s name flashing across the screen like she’d somehow sensed I was reading her text and decided to skip the waiting part entirely,

I almost didn’t answer. Almost just let it go to voicemail and dealt with it later when I had the emotional capacity to handle whatever crisis she was calling about.

But something about the way she’d called me “Peach”—a nickname she only used when she was really worried or really upset -made me swipe to answer.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Oh thank God.” Her voice was thick with tears, that particular sound that meant she’d been crying for a while and was barely holding it together. “Olive, Peach, I’ve been trying to reach you all day.”

I closed my eyes and pressed my forehead against the steering wheel. “I was at work. What’s wrong?”

“Everything.” The word came out broken, fractured into pieces. Everything is wrong and it’s all my fault.”

Here we go.

I knew this tone. Knew exactly where this conversation was headed and didn’t have the energy to deal with it, but I also knew my mother well enough to know she wouldn’t stop until she’d said whatever she needed to say.

“Mom-”

“No, please, just listen.” She was full-on sobbing now, that ugly kind of crying where you can barely get the words out. “Michelle called me again this morning. Judy’s mother. She’s absolutely destroyed, Peach. Completely devastated”

The guilt I’d been trying to hold back slammed into me like a freight train, knocking whatever air I had left straight out of my lungs.

Michelle. The woman who’d been friends with my mother for years, who’d raised Judy and watched him grow up and probably had dreams about who he’d become. Who’d just lost her son.

And I was one of the last people to see him alive.

“I know,” I managed to say, the exhaustion lingering in my voice I’m so sorry, Mom.”

“She asked about you,” Mom continued, her voice breaking on every other word. “Asked if you were okay. If the police had. bothered you. And I had to tell her that yes, they questioned you. That you’re being treated like a suspect in her son’s death.”

“I’m not a suspect-”

“But they questioned you!” Her voice rose to something close to interrogated you like you were a criminal, and it’s my fault. All of business.”

“Mom, stop-” I scream. “They brought you into the station and this is my fault because I couldn’t mind my own damn

“I pushed you to go on that date,” she said between sobs, the words tumbling out so fast it took me a while to understand them. “You didn’t want to go. You told me you weren’t ready. But I pushed and pushed because I thought I knew what was best for you, thought I could fix your life by setting you up with some nice man who would make you forget about Zane, and now that man is dead and his mother is planning his funeral and you’re caught up in a murder investigation.”

And sitting there listening to my mother fall apart, something inside my chest cracked wide open.

Because she was right. If she hadn’t set up that blind date, Judy would have just been someone I used to know from years ago. Someone whose death would have been sad but distant, like reading about a stranger in the newspaper.

Instead, I was the last person to see him alive, and now the police were looking at me like I might have had something to do with it.

“Mom,” I said quietly, trying to keep my own voice from breaking. “This isn’t your fault.”

“Yes, it is.” Her voice was raw, scraped down to nothing. “If I hadn’t set up that dinner, Judy would still be alive. Michelle would still have her son. And you wouldn’t be sitting in your caright now probably crying because your mother fucked everything up.”

I opened my mouth to argue, to tell her she couldn’t have known this would happen, that nobody could have predicted someone would murder Judy hours after our dinner.

But the words wouldn’t come.

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