Free Web NovelChapter 380: Chapter 380
He gestured around the room with a sweep of his hand. freēwēbnovel.com
"And now you are seeing, in very concrete terms, exactly what your stubbornness is costing you. This is not something I wanted, Cora. Force is never my first preference - it is messy, it is unpleasant, and it produces results that are considerably less satisfying than genuine cooperation." His voice hardened almost imperceptibly. "But you have pushed me to this point, and so here we are."
He stood from behind his desk and straightened his jacket with a calm, unhurried motion, and then he turned and gestured toward the far side of the room - toward the bed that had been sitting there in deliberate, silent significance since before Cora had even arrived.
The door beside it was open.
"I am not going to repeat myself again," he said, his voice carrying the absolute finality of someone who meant precisely that. "So I am going to say this once, clearly, and I need you to listen carefully to every word." He held her gaze steadily. "Go in there and wait for me. That is all. Just walk through that door and wait."
He held up one hand as though preemptively addressing objections.
"Nobody is going to know about what happens in that room. Nobody outside of this warehouse is ever going to see it. It is purely for my own security - insurance, nothing more, nothing different in principle from what you yourself have sought from others before."
His voice took on an almost reasonable quality. "All it requires from you is cooperation. Be a good wife, Cora. That is the sum total of what I am asking. Be a good wife, do not fight me on this, and everything - the tape, your family’s secrets, your cousin, your uncle, all of it - everything gets buried so deep that no one will ever find it. Your company survives. Your father’s name survives. Your life continues."
He tilted his head slightly.
"All you have to do is walk through that door."
The silence that followed lasted only a moment before Cora broke it, and when she spoke, her voice was shaking - not with fear, but with a rage so profound and so layered that it had moved past ordinary anger into something that occupied an entirely different category of human emotion.
"You are a psychopath," she said, and the words came out with the quiet, horrified certainty of a diagnosis rather than an insult. "You are a genuine, clinical, deeply disturbed psychopath. Do you understand that? Do you have any real awareness of what you actually are?"
She looked at him with eyes that held revulsion so complete it bordered on fascination.
"You want to blackmail me into a marriage. You want to use what you record tonight as additional leverage to ensure that I have no voice, no agency, no ability to ever stand up for myself within whatever arrangement you’ve constructed in your head. You want to own me, Lovi. That is what this actually is - you want to own me completely, and you have convinced yourself that this is somehow a legitimate thing for a human being to do to another human being."
Her voice broke slightly on the next words, not with weakness but with the weight of what she was saying.
"I thought my ex-husband was bad. I genuinely believed, for the longest time, that he represented the worst that a man could be to a woman - the worst that cruelty and control and selfishness could look like when they wore a human face." She shook her head.
"But you? You make him look like a minor inconvenience. You are the most demonic, the most thoroughly psychotic, the most comprehensively useless human being I have ever been in the same room with in my entire life."
She held his gaze without flinching, without retreating a single inch despite the ten men positioned at her back.
"You want me to enter a marriage where you control every breath I take, every word I speak, every decision I make - where I exist purely as an instrument of your comfort and your ego and your twisted idea of what a relationship is supposed to look like. Where I would not have a single voice of my own. Not one." Her jaw tightened. "That is what you are describing to me and calling it a good deal."
She let out a short, sharp breath.
"Send the video. Send everything. Send it to every person on earth if that is what you want to do, because I am not going to do your bidding. I am not going to walk through that door, I am not going to marry you, I am not going to hand you the remote control to my life in exchange for silence." Her voice dropped to something absolute. "Never. And if I had known for even one second that this was what tonight was going to be, I would never have walked through that door in the first place."
Lovi’s expression shifted, and the shift was subtle but unmistakable - from the carefully maintained patience of someone managing a difficult situation into something considerably sharper and more direct. He looked at Cora with the kind of finality that belongs to people who have exhausted their interest in negotiation.
"Now that you are here," he said, his voice calm and measured but carrying an edge that had not been present before, "what exactly are you going to do if not give me what I want? Seriously, Cora. I tried. I genuinely, sincerely tried to speak to you the way a gentleman speaks to someone he respects, someone he values."
He shook his head with something that looked almost like disappointment. "But you are not having it. You are refusing every reasonable path forward I have offered you tonight."
He straightened his shoulders.
"So I am going to use force. And I am going to get what I want. Because that is what I do, Cora - I always get what I want. Always."
