Chapter 2

The ride back to Victor' s penthouse was silent and suffocating. Celeste sat in the front seat, occasionally glancing in the rearview mirror to shoot Ava a look of pure triumph. Victor drove with a focused intensity, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. Ava stared out the window at the blurred city lights, feeling nothing. She was a ghost in her own life.

He didn' t mark his property with bruises, not usually. His control was more insidious. He marked her with public humiliation, with financial ruin, with the constant, grinding weight of her family' s fate. He owned her, and he made sure the world knew it, but he did it with the clean, sharp cruelty of a surgeon.

Back in the penthouse, a sprawling glass box in the sky, he dismissed Celeste with a cool kiss on the cheek. "I' ll meet you at the restaurant. I have to deal with... this."

The door clicked shut, leaving Ava alone with him. The silence was louder now, filled with four years of unspoken hatred.

"Go take a shower," he ordered, not looking at her. He was already loosening his tie, his attention on a tablet he' d picked up from the counter. "You look a mess."

Ava didn' t move. Her mind drifted back to a time before all this. A tech conference, five years ago. He was just Victor then, not the feared mogul Victor Thorne. He was brilliant, a rising star in pure AI research, just like his parents had been. She was a recent graduate, full of ideas. They had talked for hours over coffee, a spark of mutual respect and admiration between them. He had a fire in his eyes then, a passion for discovery. She wondered when that fire had turned to ash, replaced by this cold, vengeful darkness.

That was a month before her father, Dr. Miller, published the paper that exposed the Thorne family' s research as fundamentally fraudulent, built on stolen data. The industry imploded. The Thornes were ruined, blacklisted. A year later, they were dead. And Victor had disappeared, only to re-emerge two years later as the ruthless head of a corporate espionage empire, his sights set squarely on her family.

"Did you hear me?" His voice cut through her memories.

"I' m tired of this, Victor," she said, her voice flat and devoid of emotion. "I' ve done everything you asked. I married you. I let you destroy my reputation. I just killed my own company for you. Isn' t the debt paid yet?"

He finally looked at her, his expression unreadable. "Paid? The debt is never paid."

"Then just kill me," she said, the words slipping out with a calm she didn' t know she possessed. "It would be kinder."

For a moment, she thought she saw a crack in his composure. He took a step toward her, his mouth opening as if to say something, but then he stopped. The mask snapped back into place.

"Don' t be so dramatic," he said, his voice a low growl. "Your death is worthless to me. Your suffering, however... that has value."

He walked over to the bar and poured himself a drink, his back to her. The tension in the room was thick enough to taste. Ava watched the straight line of his shoulders, the controlled anger in his movements.

Unexpectedly, he turned around. "The doctor called. Your mother' s next treatment cycle needs to be adjusted. It' s more expensive."

He let the threat hang in the air. The leverage. The reason she couldn' t die. The reason she couldn' t leave.

"I' ll do whatever you want," she said, the words tasting like ash.

"Good." He took a sip of his drink. His eyes were cold again, all traces of that earlier flicker of humanity gone. "Now go shower. I don' t want to look at you like this."

As she walked towards the master suite, her legs feeling like lead, a strange sense of peace settled over her. It was the peace of utter hopelessness. The peace of a decision made.

He had won. He had broken her. But a broken thing can' t be controlled forever.

She stopped at the door. "Victor."

He glanced up, annoyed.

"My team... we were working on one last thing. A small piece of hardware. It' s still in the office. I want to go back and get it. Please."

He stared at her for a long moment, suspicion warring with something else in his eyes. Maybe he thought it was a trick, another escape attempt. But looking at her, at the complete absence of fight in her eyes, he seemed to decide she was no longer a threat.

"Fine," he said, waving a dismissive hand. "Go tomorrow. Take what you want. It' s all garbage now anyway."

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak. It wasn' t garbage. It was a memory. And she needed to say a proper goodbye.

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