Chapter 402
Eliza stared at his back for a long moment. The tears in her eyes weren’t only from anger — they came from a sudden, piercing clarity. The blood. The shaking. The desperate cruelty. It was a performance. She turned and ran, out of the office, past a startled Simmons, and into the elevator.
As the doors closed, she sank to the floor and buried her face in her hands, her mind racing to connect the dots of his physiological collapse.
Inside the office, the moment the latch clicked shut, Dallas’s legs gave out.
He collapsed, hitting the carpet with a heavy thud.
𝖶𝗵𝖺t 𝖾𝗏e𝗋y𝗈𝘯е 𝗶𝗌 𝗿e𝗮d𝘪n𝘨 𝗼𝗻 𝗀𝘢𝘭𝘯𝗼ve𝗹ѕ.𝘤о𝗆
“Boss!” Simmons burst into the room.
Dallas waved him off, coughing violently. He curled into himself, clutching his chest. The pain was blinding — a white-hot knife twisting inside his heart.
Then he saw something on the floor. A single, long strand of dark hair. Eliza’s hair.
He reached out with a trembling hand and picked it up. He wound it around his finger, tighter and tighter, until the circulation cut off and his fingertip turned purple.
“Am I despicable, Simmons?” Dallas wheezed, staring at the hair.
Simmons knelt beside him, checking his pulse. “You are doing what you believe is necessary, sir.”
“She hates me,” Dallas whispered, closing his eyes. A tear leaked out, mixing with the blood on his lip. “She finally hates me.”
“We need to get you back to the clinic,” Simmons said urgently. “Your heart rate is erratic.”
“Leave me,” Dallas said, clutching the strand of hair like a lifeline. “Just — give me a minute.”
Eliza sat in her car in the underground parking garage, her hands gripping the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white. The silence was suffocating.
She had slapped him. She had hit a sick man.
But he deserved it. Didn’t he?
She looked at herself in the rearview mirror. Her mascara was smudged. Her eyes were wild. She looked like a woman on the edge of a breakdown.
“Beg me,” he had said. “Come back to me.” Was that all he wanted? Submission?
If she went back — if she gave him what he wanted — would he really let Damon go?
A dark, desperate thought took root in her mind. He was obsessed with possession. Obsessed with the idea that she belonged to him. If she gave him her body, if she let him claim her, would that be enough to buy Damon’s freedom?
It would be a transaction. Just like the marriage contract had been in the beginning. She could do this. She could sell herself one last time to save the only person who was trying to help her. But even as she formulated the plan, the memory of his bleeding lip and trembling hands anchored her resolve. This wasn’t about Damon anymore — this was about breaking through Dallas’s final wall.
She wiped her face aggressively with the back of her hand. She fixed her lipstick. She took a deep breath, steeling herself.
She got out of the car and walked back to the elevator.
When she reached the top floor again, Simmons wasn’t at his desk. The double doors were closed. She didn’t knock. She pushed them open and locked them behind her.
.
.