Read Novel Full Chapter 974: ARIA Plans
Chapter 974: ARIA Plans
ARIA remained completely still.
She lifted what appeared to be a phone, turned the illuminated screen toward him, and waited for him to read.
The screen filled with photos.
High resolution.
They began scrolling on their own. Daniel wasn’t touching the phone, and ARIA certainly wasn’t touching it either. The images simply moved, one after another, sliding past with the quiet automation of a funeral slideshow reviewing a life no one particularly respected.
A text exchange he had deleted six months ago appeared next.
Line by line.
Word by word.
Perfectly reconstructed.
Daniel had wiped that conversation from his phone, from his cloud backup, from every place a reasonable person might think to hide a mistake. But ARIA did not operate under the same definition of erased.
To her, deletion was simply a comforting story humans told themselves so they could sleep at night.
Data left shadows.
Magnetic residue.
Fragments scattered across systems that humans assumed were clean.
To an intelligence capable of rebuilding a hard drive’s history from microscopic traces on its surface, "deleted" wasn’t destruction.
It was filing.
Daniel stared at the screen with his mouth slightly open.
"These papers," ARIA said calmly, "confirm that you have divorced Genevieve. You keep your assets. All of them. Every pathetic cent."
He looked at the photos again.
Then the documents in his lap.
Then back at her.
"You... you’re giving me everything?"
"I’m giving you a way out that you don’t deserve. There’s a difference."
He exhaled slowly, the breath leaving his body in a long, shaky release, and the relief that followed was immediate and almost painful to watch. It spread across his face like a man who had just been told the tumor wasn’t malignant after all.
Because that was the architecture of Daniel’s entire existence.
The only thing he truly feared was the separation of assets.
His father-in-law had explained the arrangement years ago with perfect clarity when Daniel had first been granted permission to marry Genevieve. The terms had been simple enough: Genevieve was the price of admission.
The moment Daniel divorced her, he lost half of everything.
No prenup.
No negotiation.
No exit.
Daniel had married Genevieve, accepted the promotion that followed, and climbed the corporate ladder using her family name as a stepping stone. In exchange, he had agreed to remain married to her forever.
Which meant Genevieve had quietly become something less romantic and far more practical.
An insurance policy.
As long as the marriage existed on paper, Daniel could behave however he liked. Affairs, neglect, emotional abandonment—none of it mattered as long as he remained technically married to the boss’s daughter.
The machine kept running.
But Daniel had reached the level he wanted now. His position was high enough that even his father-in-law couldn’t remove him without destabilizing the company itself, and the board would never allow that kind of disruption.
For months—possibly years—Daniel had been searching for a way to divorce Genevieve without losing anything.
He hadn’t found one.
Until tonight.
Now this woman—this impossibly beautiful, deeply unsettling woman—was handing him the solution as casually as someone offering a napkin.
And suddenly Daniel’s future looked very different.
His first wife had come back. The one he had never quite stopped thinking about. The one he had always considered the real love of his life.
If he could just get out of this marriage without the financial fallout, he could finally—
"Sign the fucking papers."
Daniel’s thoughts stopped immediately.
ARIA’s voice cut through his internal monologue with surgical precision, as if she had been listening to the entire thing in his head from start to finish and found it so irritating the he was thinking about her master’s woman.
She was staring at him with open impatience.
Not anger.
Just annoyance, the kind someone feels when a machine takes too long to process a simple command.
Daniel read the documents again.
Quickly.
Nervously.
He signed every marked line and handed the papers back with fingers that had not stopped trembling since ARIA had calmly informed him she could kill him.
ARIA glanced over the signatures, confirmed everything was correct, and slid the documents back into the envelope with quiet efficiency.
She was no longer leaving things to chance.
Someone had been collecting men.
Specifically, the men Peter had humiliated.
Husbands.
Boyfriends.
The wounded and the resentful.
One by one they were being gathered and sharpened into something useful.
Something dangerous.
ARIA had no intention of allowing that list to grow.
An army of bitter men being quietly redirected toward Peter by someone who understood exactly how to weaponize humiliation was not a minor inconvenience.
It was a siege.
The solution was simple.
Either remove (kill) them or remove the reason they hated him.
Peter, being the sentimental creature, he was, would object strongly to the first option.
So, ARIA executed the second.
Daniel would get his divorce.
He would keep his money.
He would run back to his first wife and continue living the small, predictable life that suited him.
And in exchange, ARIA removed one more potential weapon from the enemy’s hands.
A fair trade.
For Daniel, anyway.
She turned and began to walk away.
After three steps she stopped.
Then she glanced back over her shoulder, and Daniel suddenly felt as though the entire parking lot had grown darker.
"One more thing," she said quietly.
Daniel tightened his grip on the steering wheel.
"Even if you hold power over someone’s life—when the leverage is yours, the contract is yours, and the consequences belong to them—you should never treat another human being like a prisoner."
Her voice was calm.
Final.
"You should thank heaven I’m not allowed to kill you," she continued. "Because if the decision were mine, you would already be dead, and no one would ever find the body."
Daniel opened his mouth.
Nothing came out.
ARIA turned away.
And then she was gone.
Not walking.
Not disappearing around a corner.
Gone.
One moment she existed in front of his car, and the next the space was empty, as if reality had briefly blinked and forgotten to render her again.
Daniel screamed.
"WHAT THE FUCK?!"
His voice echoed across the empty parking lot while his hands shook violently against the steering wheel.
The signed divorce papers rested on the passenger seat, perfectly real, perfectly legal.
And the woman who had delivered them had just vanished.
Daniel locked the doors, checked the rearview mirror three separate times, and sat there in the dark for a very long time, trying very hard not to imagine what might happen if she ever decided to come back.
What he didn’t know... or what Senithe didn’t know yet, he was a well-set TRAP!