Christine, who'd been turning a blind eye to everything until then, called me with a warning: pull something like that again, and I could forget about the fifty million dollars we'd agreed on.
That was the moment I finally saw myself clearly.
I wasn't some important character holding a childhood-sweetheart script.
I was an NPC. The kind they could use as a punching bag, threaten, and discard the second I touched their bottom line.
Sentiment was the cheapest currency between us.
They all sucked in a breath.
Terrified I'd do what I always used to do—make a scene over a tiny scratch, blow it out of proportion, all just to make him glance my way.
In the end, I'd been nothing but a clown. He'd sneered that I was no princess anymore, just a spoiled brat faking her wounds, making a scene nobody wanted to clean up.
But all I did was calmly wipe the blood away with a napkin, crack open a bottle of liquor, and press a soaked tissue against the cut.
A sharp sting burrowed from the wound into my bones, then deeper, into my heart.
It felt like rotten flesh being stripped away. A relief.
Everything was finally coming to an end.