Chapter 16
Chapter 16:
It wasn’t until the servants moved toward her that Ravenna’s paralysis broke.
“No!” The scream came from a place I hadn’t known she possessed—raw, unperformative, stripped of every layer of calculation I’d come to associate with her voice. “Thane, it’s your child! Yours p>
She clutched at his arm. He didn’t pull away—he simply stood there, her fingers on his sleeve, and looked at her with the expression of a man examining something that has ceased to function.
“You said you loved me.” Her voice cracked along its seams. “You said I was the only one. How can you do this p>
Thane let out a short breath through his nose. Not quite a laugh—laughs require some form of joy, however twisted. This was just air leaving a body.
“I never loved you p>
Four words. Delivered without emphasis, without cruelty, without anything at all—which made them worse than a shout, because a shout acknowledges the other person’s existence, and these words were spoken the way you’d read the expiration date on a carton of milk. Factual. Indifferent. Already thinking about what comes next.
Ravenna began to tremble. I watched it through the camera—a fine vibration that started in her hands and spread outward, the body’s response to a reality it cannot metabolize. She had built five years of her life on a foundation he’d just identified as nonexistent, and the structural collapse was happening in real time.
The servants had her arms now. She fought—elbows, knees, the desperate, artless violence of someone who has nothing left to lose except the one thing being taken.
“Please—” She was sobbing. The mascara ran in dark tracks, and beneath the makeup and the performance and the five years of studied poise, she looked like what she was: a young woman who had gambled everything on the wrong man and was discovering, at the worst possible moment, that the house always wins. “Don’t kill the baby. Please. Let it live. I’ll leave. I’ll disappear. You’ll never see us again. Just let it live p>
Thane didn’t watch them take her. He had already turned away—moved on, literally and figuratively, the way he moved on from everything: completely, immediately, as if the previous scene had been a program he’d closed and would not reopen.
The other women stood in the hallway, a cluster of frozen faces, understanding at last the terms of the contract they’d signed.
“Pack your things.” Thane’s gaze swept across them—slow, empty, the searchlight of a man inventorying assets he no longer required. “All of you. You have one hour p>
Lɒtєѕτ chɑρτєrs ιn
They went.
No arguments, no negotiations, no attempts at the teary persuasion that Ravenna had tried. They simply filed upstairs, packed their bags, and left—a quiet exodus, shoes clicking on the stairs, the front door opening and closing with the regularity of a pulse.