“What’s the matter? Are you too ashamed to let us see your face?” she called out, her voice filled with pure contempt. “You’re nothing but a pathetic coward who has to hide in the shadows and use dirty tricks to get what you want. How absolutely disgusting.” Read full story at fι?dnοvel.net

Dead silence came from the phone’s speaker. No voice responded to her challenge.

But Elliana’s finely tuned intuition told her that the person listening on the other end was absolutely seething with rage. Their anger was probably building to dangerous levels.

Perfect. That was exactly what she had been hoping to achieve.

She needed to provoke them and create some kind of crack in this deadly stalemate they were all trapped in.

“You can’t even show your face to us,” she continued, her voice becoming as sharp and cutting as a razor blade. “That tells me everything I need to know about what kind of person you really are. You’re a twisted, ugly creature that can only survive by hiding in the darkness.”

Pausing, she taunted, “If you’re a woman, no decent man would ever want to come anywhere near you. If you’re a man, no woman with any self-respect would waste even five minutes of her time on someone as worthless as you. You’re destined to spend your entire miserable life surrounded by nothing but filth and garbage. You’ll never be good enough to even touch the hem of a truly extraordinary woman’s dress!”

It was a completely wild shot in the dark, a stream of insults based on nothing but a hunch about what might hurt this person the most. But before she could even finish her tirade, the ragged sound of furious breathing began crackling through the phone’s speaker.

Direct hit. Bull’s-eye.

Elliana’s lips curved into a smile of pure triumph. She had struck exactly the right nerve. From the sound of that breathing, it was definitely a man on the other end. And from the intensity of that rage, it was a man who had been rejected and scarred so deeply by some woman that it had completely twisted his soul into something monstrous.

“You insolent little bitch!” the voice on the other end snarled through gritted teeth, the words crackling with barely contained fury.

Elliana strained her ears, trying to pick up any additional clues from the sound of his voice that might help her identify him. Yes, definitely a man. His voice sounded grim and bitter, carrying the weight of middle age and years of accumulated resentment.

But as she listened, her eyes flickered toward the scar-faced man and his army of assassins. Something very strange was happening to them. They were all trembling now, their earlier confidence and menace completely replaced by raw, primal fear. A single disembodied voice from the line had reduced these dangerous killers to this pathetic state. Whoever was on the other end of that video call wasn’t just their leader or employer. He was their absolute terror, the thing they feared more than death.

A bold and disturbing thought suddenly struck Elliana like a lightning bolt. Was it possible that these men had some kind of AI control chips implanted directly into their brains? Were they nothing more than human puppets, with their strings being pulled by the monster hiding on the other end of that camera?

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