Chapter 302:

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For seven years, she had been forced to endure Germaine Chambers’s lessons — not just in flower arranging and etiquette, but in the old woman’s favorite weapon: the precise, cutting Parisian French she used to humiliate her guests. Elisa had learned it, perfected it in silence. Now she would turn that weapon back on its own kind. Her voice was different. The accent was gone. The soft, American cadence was replaced by something else — something rapid, fluid, and razor-sharp.

“Madame Sinclair, votre tentative de m’acheter est à la fois pathétique et insultante.”

Rosalind blinked. The smile froze on her face. She had not expected this. She spoke some French — every good society woman did — but the speed, the accent, and the sheer venom in Elisa’s voice caught her off guard.

Elisa turned her gaze to Allena, who was staring at her in open-mouthed confusion.

“Quant à vous, ma chère,” Elisa continued, her French flawless, her tone dripping with ice, “vous vous battez pour un homme qui n’est rien de plus que mes déchets d’occasion.”

Allena’s mouth snapped shut. She didn’t understand the words, but she understood the tone. It was a slap.

“What did you say?” Allena demanded, her voice high and shrill. “Speak English!”

Elisa switched back to English, her voice slow and deliberate, savoring every syllable. “I said, he’s secondhand trash. And you’re welcome to him.”

The words hit Allena like a physical blow. Her face flushed a deep, ugly red. “You bitch!”

Elisa picked up the settlement agreement. She didn’t read it. She simply held it up, looking at the dense legal text and the signatures waiting at the bottom.

𝖱𝖾𝘢𝗱 𝘧𝘳𝘦e nov𝖾𝘭𝘀 о𝘯 𝗀a𝗹𝘯о𝘷e𝗅𝗌.𝖼𝗼𝘮

Then, with both hands, she tore it down the middle. The sound was sharp, satisfying. She tore it again. And again. Until it was nothing but a pile of confetti.

She let the pieces fall from her fingers, drifting down onto the coffee table like dirty snow.

“Get out,” Elisa said, her voice dropping to a lethal whisper. “The exit is behind you. Don’t let the trash dirty my table on the way out.”

Rosalind was trembling with rage. “You… you ungrateful little wretch. You’ll regret this. You’ll be left with nothing!”

Allena lunged forward, her hands clawed, her face twisted with hatred. “I’ll kill you!”

Elisa sidestepped with the effortless grace of a dancer. Allena stumbled past her, catching herself on the edge of the table.

Elisa picked up her phone. “Leave,” she said, her voice calm. “Or I’ll have the cafe’s security escort you out in front of half of Wall Street’s tech sector.”

Rosalind grabbed Allena’s arm, dragging her toward the door. They fled out the entrance, their heels clicking frantically against the stone floor.

Elisa watched them go. She let the tension drain out of her shoulders. The silence rushed back in, broken only by the sound of her own steady breathing.

She walked back to the coffee table and picked up her coffee. It was cold. She didn’t care. She took a sip, the bitter taste a perfect match for the cold, hard victory in her heart.

Three days later, Elisa’s phone buzzed with an email. It was from Maeve Kearney, a friend who ran one of the top PR firms in the city.

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