---- Chapter 18 Emily POV: | couldn't return Josiah's declaration. Not yet. My heart was still a battlefield, scarred and occupied by the ghost of my love for Killian, a love that had curdled into a cold, hard knot of hatred. | knew, with a certainty that settled deep in my bones, that | couldn't move forward, couldn't even think about a future with someone as good as Josiah, until | had settled the past. Killian had to pay. He and Dallas both. Only then would | be free. Josiah, with his quiet, unnerving empathy, seemed to understand. He didn't push. He just squeezed my hand and said, "| can wait. I'm very good at it." His patience was a balm on my wounded soul. For the first time in a very long time, | felt a flicker of something that wasn't rage or grief. A tiny, fragile glimmer of hope. Killian, however, was anything but patient. He became my shadow, a relentless, haunting presence. He showed up at my language school, at the cafes where | studied, outside Josiah's apartment building. He didn't threaten or yell. He pleaded. ---- He brought me breakfast every morning, the same croissants from the bakery | used to love. Each morning, | would take the bag from his hand, look him dead in the eye, and drop it into the nearest trash can. "| don't love you anymore, Killian," | told him, my voice flat and emotionless. His face would crumple, his eyes filling with a pathetic, wounded pain. "Don't say that, Em. Please. Just give me one more chance. We promised. Forever." "You broke that promise first," I'd reply, turning my back on him. He looked like a stray dog, beaten and abandoned, and a small, treacherous part of me remembered the broken boy | had first taken in. | had fallen for that wounded look once before, believing | could heal him. | wouldn't make the same mistake twice. This went on for a week. A week of my cold refusals and his desperate, groveling pursuit. Then, one afternoon, as he was begging me to just have one cup of coffee with him, his phone rang. He answered it, and the color drained from his face. "What do you mean, she escaped?" he snarled into the phone. "How is that possible?" A few hours later, the world knew why. Dallas Lucas, looking bruised and emaciated, had started a ---- live broadcast on her social media. In a tear-choked voice, she told a harrowing story of being held captive, of being brutally abused by the monster Killian Emerson. She held up a doctor's report, her hands shaking. "He did this to me because | was pregnant with his child," she sobbed to her millions of followers. "And then... and then he kicked me, and | lost our baby." The internet exploded. The hashtags #JusticeForDallas and #CancelKillianEmerson trended worldwide. The public, always eager for a story of a beautiful, wronged woman and a villainous billionaire, ate it up. They saw her as a victim, a brave survivor. | saw her for what she was: a brilliant, manipulative evil. She was using the very real violence he' d inflicted on her to craft a narrative of her own innocence, erasing her own monstrous acts in the process. And it was working.