Chapter 10: The Price on My Silence

"Keep her quiet." Priya reads it out loud like saying it might make it less real. "Rebecca, this isn't a prank anymore. This is a paper trail. Somebody's building a case against you before you even know what the trial is."

I can't stop staring at the number. Seventy thousand dollars sitting in an account with my name stamped on it like a receipt for something I never agreed to sell. And underneath the fear, something else is starting to burn, slower, steadier. Anger has always been the thing I know how to do with fear. My mother taught me that without meaning to, every time she came home from a double shift too tired to cry and scrubbed the kitchen counter instead until it shone.

"I need to show Christian." My voice doesn't sound like mine.

"Do you?" Priya's arms cross tight over her chest. "Because the last two people who knew about this account are his father and whoever's sending you these texts. Maybe it's time you ask yourself if those are actually two different people."

The thought lands like a slap, and I let it land instead of flinching away from it, because I'm done being the last person in every room to understand what's happening to me. "He wouldn't threaten his own son's relationship and then dangle proof of it like bait. It doesn't fit his pattern. He's not sloppy. Whoever's doing this wants me scared and isolated. That's not Graham Ashworth's style. He doesn't need me scared. He just needs me gone."

"So who benefits from scared and isolated?"

"Somebody who can't make me disappear outright." I say it slowly, turning the account number over in my head like evidence instead of a wound. "Somebody who needs me to do it to myself."

Priya looks at me for a long moment, something like pride breaking through the worry on her face. "There she is."

I promise her I'll tell Christian everything, and for once the promise isn't me handing him my fear to carry. It's me deciding what I need from him before I walk into that conversation.

He's waiting at the base of the stairs when my last class lets out, hands shoved deep in his pockets, already wearing the look of someone who's heard about the dining hall. News like that travels fast here, especially cruelty.

"I heard what Dom said." He gets there before I can. "I'm sorry. I should have said something."

"You should have." I don't soften it, and I don't let him pull me into an apology that costs him nothing. "But I'm not here to talk about Dom. I'm here to tell you what I've decided."

Something shifts in his face, uncertain, like he wasn't expecting me to walk in with terms instead of tears. I show him the new number on the screen and watch the color drain out of him the way it drained out of me an hour earlier, but I don't wait for him to finish being shocked before I keep talking.

"I grew up watching my mother work three jobs so Toby and I never had to feel what being poor actually costs a person." My voice stays steady, even though my chest is anything but. "I know what it looks like when somebody decides your silence is worth buying. I am not going to be bought, Christian. Not by your father, not by whoever sent that text, and not by you, every time you let a room full of people decide what I'm worth."

"I'm not trying to buy you."

"No. You're trying to keep two different lives running at the same time without either one costing you anything. That's not the same as loving someone, even if it feels that way from where you're standing." I fold my arms, holding my own ground on pavement I've walked a hundred times feeling smaller than I do right now. "So here's what I need. Not promises. Not a gala three weeks from now where I'm supposed to stand quietly and wait to see if you find your spine in front of an audience. I need you to go to your father today and tell him to close that account, in front of me, on the phone, right now. If you can't do that, I need you to stop telling me you're trying, because trying without proof is just another version of silence."

He stares at me, and for a second I watch him search for the version of this conversation where he gets to explain his way out of it. I've given him six years of that version. I'm not giving him another hour of it today.

"Okay," he says finally, quieter than I expected. "Okay. Right now."

He pulls out his phone with hands that aren't quite steady, and for the first time since I met him in that rainy courtyard six years ago, I watch Christian Ashworth do something that actually costs him something, in front of me, instead of after I've already walked away hurt.

His father picks up on the second ring. I can't hear the words, just the cold shape of his father's voice through the speaker, but I watch Christian's jaw lock, watch him hold his ground instead of folding the way he folded in that dining hall, and something tight and frightened in my chest loosens by one single degree.

"Close it," Christian says, flat and final. "Today. Or I go to the gala and tell every person in that room exactly what you did to Kate, and exactly what you're trying to do now."

The silence on the other end stretches long enough that I start counting my own heartbeat against it.

"Fine," his father says finally, voice tinny through the speaker, and the word lands less like a victory than like the opening move in a much longer game. "Consider it closed. You'll regret protecting her, Christian. They always cost more than they're worth."

The call ends. Christian lowers the phone slowly, and for a second neither of us says anything, the quad noise rushing in around the silence we just made.

"I did it," he says, like he's surprised at himself.

"You did." I don't reach for him, not yet. Some wounds don't close just because somebody finally shows up to stop the bleeding. "That's a start. It isn't everything."

My phone buzzes before he can answer, and this time I don't flinch reading it, I just read it, steady, because I've decided I'm not going to let fear be the only thing this number ever makes me feel.

Closing the account doesn't erase what it proved. He only moves fast when he's scared of losing something. Ask yourself what he's really scared of.