Chapter 577:

🍙 🍙 🍙 🍙 🍙

The silence that followed was absolute.

Cedrick didn’t move. Didn’t speak. She watched his face transform, watched the softness drain away and be replaced by something harder, colder, more familiar.

“You would throw away twelve million dollars.” Not a question.

“I would throw away twelve billion.” Her voice was shaking, but she forced the words out anyway. “I would throw away everything you have, everything you are, if it meant being free of you.”

His hand moved. She flinched — expecting a blow, expecting restraint, expecting the violence that had always lurked beneath his surface.

Instead, he reached down. His hand swept across the plush floor mat, searching. For a moment she thought it was lost — a tiny jewel swallowed by the opulent darkness. Then she heard the faint click of stone against metal as his fingers closed around it. He retrieved the earring from the floor and held it in his open palm, the ruby dark against his skin like a drop of blood.

“Then throw it away.” His voice was soft. Terrible. “The window is right there. The Hudson is deep. No one will find it. No one will know.” He extended his hand, the earring resting on his palm like an offering — or a challenge. “Go ahead.”

She looked at the window. At the rain-streaked glass, at the grey water beyond. She thought of the weight she would feel in her hand, the density of stone and metal and intention.

She couldn’t do it.

The knowledge settled in her stomach like lead. She wasn’t free. Had never been free. Was bound to him by chains she couldn’t see and couldn’t break, her rebellion nothing more than a performance for an audience of one.

Her hand found her pocket. Her fingers closed around something small, wrapped in paper, forgotten until this moment.

𝖥𝗶n𝘥 𝘯𝗈𝘃е𝗹 PD𝖥𝗌 𝗈𝗇 𝘨a𝗅nо𝘷𝖾𝗅s.co𝘮

The mint candy. From the plane. Pressed into her hand by Joy with quiet instructions to breathe, to calm down, to survive.

She knew the war of words was lost. Violence was pointless. He expected her to scream or cry, to fight or to fold. She would do neither. She would do something he couldn’t categorize — an act so absurd it would shatter the tension and, for a brief moment, return a sliver of control to her. It was not surrender. It was a change of battlefield.

She unwrapped it with shaking fingers and held it up between them, the white disc catching the dim light.

“Open your mouth.”

He stared at her. For a moment something flickered in his eyes — surprise, perhaps, or confusion, or the distant echo of the man he might have been in another life.

Then, slowly, he obeyed.

She placed the candy on his tongue. Her fingers brushed his lips, felt the warmth of his breath, the slight parting as he closed his mouth around the offering.

“Shut up,” she said. Her voice was rough, broken, barely audible. “I don’t want to hear any more.”

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