Chapter 4 - Begging at My Feet
The silence in the ballroom was absolute, broken only by Wendy’s muffled sobbing and Isaac’s heavy, ragged breathing. The fifty high-society guests who had stood by and watched my torture earlier that evening were now frantically trying to slip toward the exits, desperate to disassociate themselves from the disgraced Vances. But Noah raised a single finger, and two security guards smoothly blocked the double doors, ensuring no one left until the reckoning was entirely complete. Isaac crawled across the polished marble floor on his hands and knees, ignoring the dirt and the spilled champagne, stopping right at my feet. He reached out with trembling, filthy fingers to grab the hem of my coat, but I stepped back smoothly, refusing to let him touch me.
“Flora... please,” Isaac choked out, his voice cracking with humiliation and terror, tears spilling over his cheeks. “Please, you have to help us. Talk to your brothers. Tell them to stop this! We’ve been married for two years! We had good times, didn’t we? Please, Flora, I was just angry, I didn’t mean it, it was just a joke—” I looked down at him, my expression completely impassive, devoid of the fear or submission he had grown accustomed to exploiting. “A joke?” I repeated softly, my voice cutting through the quiet room like a razor blade. “You tied me to a beam, Isaac. You whipped me thirty times because of a spilled glass of wine. You and your family treated me like trash from the very first day I walked into this estate, assuming that because I came from a quiet family, I had no one to protect me.”
Isaac sobbed openly, rocking back on his heels, completely broken. Behind him, Arthur and Wendy looked on in silent horror, their lifetime of arrogance and cruelty utterly dismantled in a single evening. “We’re ruined, Flora... we’ll go to prison for the rest of our lives, we won’t even have a penny to our names,” Isaac wept, looking up at me with desperate, pleading eyes. “Please... I’m begging you. Have mercy on us.” I tilted my head, looking down at the man who had called my brothers “gangsters” as an insult, only to discover too late that my family was an untouchable force of nature. “Mercy?” I asked quietly. “You didn’t show mercy when you whipped me. You didn’t show mercy when you plotted to have me killed for insurance money.” I turned my gaze toward Clover, who was frozen against the wall in terror, and then back to Isaac. “You wanted me to learn my place, Isaac. My place is at the top. And yours is right here, in the dirt where you belong.”
