Chapter 4 Finally! Freedom

Aria

I woke up for the first time in a year without dreading what the day would bring. No twist of tension in my stomach. No metal-gray eyes watching me from across the breakfast table. No cold shoulder in a chilled manor that had never been home.

I was free. And yet, the freedom didn't taste like victory-it tasted like sorrow.

I looked at the single suitcase sitting in the corner of the unfamiliar room. Ella's guest room. She'd opened her arms to me the moment I called her when I left Leon. She didn't ask questions. "Just come. Breathe. Cry if you must."

"You're not weak for leaving," she'd whispered as she rubbed my back as I cried into her shoulder.

But that was exactly the way I felt.

Broken. Weak. Shattered.

Because no matter how much I knew I had to leave, a part of me still hung back clinging to the man who'd shattered me without so much as being aware of it.

Leon Knight.

He'd never screamed. Never slapped.

But silence was a form of cruelty too. And so was indifference. And for a whole year, I'd suffered both.

The flashbacks hit in waves.

Our wedding day, when I signed the marriage contract with shaking hands, still wondering why he had chosen me out of all persons.

The initial weeks, when he hardly spoke to me unless it pertained to arrangements.

The moments when I had to eat alone, sleep alone, be alone-despite living in the same house with my husband.

His cold distance had eroded my heart day after day, so that I no longer knew myself. Until Ella found me in her bathroom one night, staring at the mirror and talking to myself, saying, "What are you doing to yourself?"

I didn't want to be that woman any longer.

Now, in this odd liberty, I was trying to remember who I was before Leon. Before I became the shadow of a woman waiting to be loved.

I picked up my phone. Dozens of missed calls. All from him.

I didn't answer.

I couldn't.

Not yet.

He would expect me to come back like nothing had happened. Like he hadn't emotionally starved me for 365 straight days. But I wasn't that same woman who had signed on the dotted line.

I was becoming someone different now. Someone who didn't beg to be seen.

---

Later that evening, Ella walked into the room with a bucket of ice cream and a pair of oversized socks.

"Emergency supplies," she said with a small smile, setting them on the bed.

"Thanks," I growled.

She edged beside me, nudging at me gently. "You okay?"

"Not exactly," I whispered. "But I will be."

She set a spoon in my hand. "That's a start."

We were silent, the kind that did not weigh heavy on the chest. The kind that felt safe. Soothing. Healing.

Until my phone began buzzing again.

Ella was grabbing for it before I could.

"It's him again. You want me to block him?"

I headed. "No. Let him call. Let him wonder."

Let him go through even an infinitesimal tenth of what I went through during a whole year.

---

Leon

The quietness was suffocating me.

I'd watched all the CCTV tapes, monitored all the transactions, even called her Ella knowing she'd never tell.

I had no idea where Aria was gone.

And for the first time in my entire life, I was scared.

Real, gnawing terror that I'd lost her. That she was really gone.

That the woman I'd taken for granted, dodged around, and played for a fool had finally hit her breaking point.

The contract was never going to be anything. But it was. It changed everything.

She changed everything.

And I was too blind to see it-too late.

I stared at the divorce documents she'd placed on the dinner table, the signed papers a neat, unfeeling conclusion.

But I wasn't willing to let her go.

Not yet.

Not ever.