Chapter 361: The Window Wasn’t a Forgiveness Policy

Harden asked me to think about family while the bruise beneath my old bandage reminded me how enthusiastically mine had tried to collect me as freight.

He waited in the secured berth room with a recovery guard outside. His borrowed command vessel was gone, his creditor wanted payment, and Hansen wasn’t answering the calls that might require him to contribute anything except blame.

There was no hidden fortune waiting behind the speech. I had taken the money, and the rest of their recent power had been promises made against things they hoped to steal back.

"You could end this," Harden said. "Give us something to rebuild with, and nobody needs to keep dragging the girls into it."

"You could have stopped dragging them into it before you sent the first person after them, which made your timing difficult to admire."

The room smelled of damp equipment and untouched coffee. He had pushed his cup away without drinking, apparently saving his attention for whichever threat might still move me. I noticed how ordinary he looked with the expensive machinery gone, and that made the years of fear feel even uglier.

He tried smiling. I watched the effort with the new lie detector quiet, because a bad smile wasn’t a spoken statement and I refused to confuse my anger with proof the skill hadn’t supplied.

"I never wanted Lyra hurt," he said.

The warning appeared again, clean and unmistakable.

[System: Same lie, mate. Your shiny new paint hasn’t improved his material, and apparently being broke didn’t leave room in the budget for a different bloody script.]

I had heard enough of it before the skill could tell me anything.

I thought about Channel’s part in the old arrangement, the poison, the casino exposure, and all the times my uncles had treated people I loved as useful handles to pull me around with.

Then I thought about Lyra asleep upstairs, trusting that telling her where I was going meant something even when she hated the reason.

Harden offered to sign whatever I wanted. He offered names I hadn’t asked for and assets he didn’t own. Finally, when I didn’t answer quickly enough, he said my little club would be difficult to protect for several months while I played explorer.

That was the moment I stopped looking for a conversation worth finishing.

I didn’t lose control. I didn’t hear an imaginary order that made the choice someone else’s. The new form hadn’t changed my mind into a monster’s mind while the innocent version watched from behind the glass.

I knew exactly who I was angry with.

I left the room long enough to tell the contractor that its payment dispute no longer bought Harden a place in my building. The guard argued about the missing balance, and I offered no money to make his problem disappear.

What followed was my decision, carried out without an audience I could blame for encouraging it.

By the time I returned upstairs, Harden had been taken outside the club. He remained bound beyond the exterior viewing glass, suspended in the water he couldn’t breathe, and I had chosen not to bring him back in.

There was no quest announcement. No EXP arrived to dress the act as progress, and Old Mate didn’t offer me a medal made from somebody else’s suffering.

Bridget saw my face first. She asked where he was, and I told her without using words like accident or necessary to soften what I had done.

Cherry went to the window. Lyra stayed beside the table, looking at me with a hurt that had nothing to do with whether she loved me.

"You don’t get to call this something you did for us," she said.

"I wasn’t going to, because I did it because I wanted him gone."

The answer didn’t make her forgive it. I hadn’t expected it to, and I refused the easier comfort of pretending the women who loved me had to approve every ugly part of me.

Lukas arrived with the travel bags while the room was still quiet. He looked through the glass, looked at me, and asked whether I understood what would happen when the family heard.

I told him I did not know all of it. That was the truth, and the lie detector wasn’t needed to make uncertainty feel heavy.

He asked whether I was still coming.

The trip had been planned before this choice, with a two-seat hired coastal crawler, a prepaid first supply stop, and a route that belonged to the two of us. Leaving didn’t erase what waited behind me, and I would have to come home to the women who had just heard me admit it.

I said I was coming, then stayed long enough to say goodbye properly instead of using departure to escape their faces.

Cherry held me first, angry and affectionate at once. Bridget kissed my head and told me she expected the agreed calls, including the difficult ones. Lyra took longer, then rested her forehead against mine where the red surface held steady beneath her touch.

"Come back honestly," she said. "Don’t spend three months practicing a nicer version of what happened."

I promised her that, because it was a promise I could keep even if the truth stayed ugly.

Old Mate appeared at the edge of my sight as Lukas and I boarded the little crawler. His drink remained on the bar for once, and he watched the departure without trying to turn it into a travel advertisement.

[System: Just you and the spider now, mate. Pack your excuses somewhere separate, because those bastards won’t get lighter with distance.]

I wasn’t asking you to carry them.

Lukas took the first driving shift. The girls remained inside the club, and nobody joined us through a last-minute doorway or followed in a hired escort.

As we passed the VIP glass, Harden’s final movement stopped. He floated beyond the window, bound and still, with the bright Milk Bar sign reflected across the water around him.

Then my father’s name lit up inside my phone while Lukas asked which road we were taking out of Ami.