I sat in the silence of the smaller conference room long after the click of the lock had echoed against the walls. I sat there, paralyzed, my mind a jagged loop of the last ten minutes.
I replayed it over and over, the way the air seemed to flee the room when I mentioned the word prison. I saw the way Cassian's jaw had tightened, the bone nearly popping beneath the skin of his cheek. I saw that blank, impenetrable Wolfe expression, but for the first time, I saw what it was trying to bury.
He looked hurt.
My chest felt tight, as if an invisible wire were being wound around my ribs, cinching tighter with every shallow breath I took. This should have been the moment of my greatest triumph. I had won. I had stood up to the titan, I had bitten the hand that owned me, and I had secured the very thing I'd been praying for since that night I punched him.
Freedom. I was out of the contract. I was away from Cassian's suffocating, mercurial control. The debt was dead.
