Against Cruelty, She Grew Strong (by Anastasia Glover) novel Chapter 616

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Even in Darkfees. She chose to Rise

Chapter 616 A Sentence Beyond Regret

Those words were vicious. Unbelievably vicious.

How had he never noticed before that her tongue was laced with such absoline venom?

No, it was more accurate to say that he had simply never taken the time to truly understand her in the past.

He had grown habitually accustomed to consuming her compromises and accepting her absolute protection, thoroughly consumed by his own petty vengeance and the ruthless scramble for his family estate, never once taking a microsecond to consider her feelings.

It was only after she vanished and succumbed to amnesia that the fog had slowly cleared from his brain. He had meticulously analyzed those past chapters of his life over and over again, only to realize what an absolute, monstrous bastard he had been.

Tatiana had been entirely correct about him. He didn’t deserve her.

Yet human nature was inherently selfish, always desperately laboring under the delusion that a few empty gestures of penance could seamlessly rewrite the past, always executing meaningless sacrifices just to satisfy their own emotional narrative.

“You are entirely right, Tammy,” Lucas murmured, a heavy layer of self-derision coating his tone. “A woman like you deserves to find someone infinitely better, not a piece of absolute trash like me or Norman.”

Tammy found herself momentarily stripped of a response, entirely unsure of how to navigate his sudden submission.

As the silence stretched, her razor-sharp vision pinned a localized patch of dark bruising coloring the corner of Lucas’s jawline, looking exactly as though he had recently taken a heavy blow to the face.

The pieces of the puzzle aligned instantly, and a fresh wave of irritation cut through her text. “Did Norman track you down?”

Lucas flashed a look of genuine surprise at her immediate deduction. “He did. Last night, he breached my perimeter and demanded answers regarding a few specific parameters.”

“The two of you engaged in a physical altercation?”

“You could call it that. Though objectively speaking, I was merely acting as a unilateral punching bag for the duration of the encounter.”

“Serves you right! You know exactly what kind of lethal background that psychopath commands, yet you still choose to provoke him? You have an absolute death wish!”

While both of them were nothing more than toxic garbage in her eyes, Norman was undeniably the breed of garbage that knew how to efficiently dismantle a human target in a fistfight.

“He didn’t initially intend to launch an assault,” Lucas noted mildly.

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Chapter 616 A-Sentence Beyond Regret

“Then what exactly triggered the violence?”

“I openly mocked him.

Finished

Objectively speaking, some individuals truly earned every single ounce of the violence directed at them.

“I informed him that his entire dynamic with you was built on a foundation of calculated deception. making him nothing more than a pathetic coward,” Lucas explained, his voice entirely light. “I told him that the absolute second your mind cleared, his standing would be a hell of a lot worse than mine.”

“And then?”

“And then his emotional defenses completely shattered.”

“Pfft.”

Tammy couldn’t contain her amusement, letting out a sharp, spontaneous burst of laughter.

A relaxed, casual expression settled over Lucas’s features. “You truly should have caught a glimpse of his face in that microsecond. His complexion turned completely black and foul, looking exactly like he had just been forced to swallow a mouth full of dirt.”

“Are you honestly not terrified that he might have beaten you to death right then and there?”

“Not in the slightest. He lacks the nerve to cross that boundary. If he executed a lethal strike against my person, he would simply secure his own lifetime incarceration as an accessory. I maintained a continuous digital recording of the entire interaction from my breast pocket.”

“You are remarkably calculating.”

“No, I am far from calculating,” he countered softly, the smile fading from his eyes. “I am nothing more than an absolute fool.”

Only a truly incompetent, brainless fool would actively throw away the solitary individual who adored him, leaving himself with nothing but a lifetime of suffocating remorse.

Following the brief exchange, the rigid tension suffocating the atmosphere slowly began to dissipate.

୮

Tammy reluctantly abandoned her strategy to retreat, relaxing her posture as she casually lay back against the corrugated steel paneling.

The night sky across this territory was breathtakingly beautiful, an immense, unclouded canvas crowded with a dense collection of brilliant stars. Illuminated beneath the pure wash of the moonlight, she looked incredibly vibrant and striking, her entire frame radiating a fierce, untamed vitality that remained completely unmatched.

Lucas found it an absolute impossibility to withdraw his gaze from her profile, and the visual lock caused a sharp, crushing agony to rip straight through his chest, looking exactly as though his heart tissue were being violently dismantled from the inside out.

“Tammy.”

“Yeah?”

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Chapter 616 Sentence Beyond Regret

Finished

“Can I ask a single, solitary favor of you?”

“My answer is a flat refusal.”

“At least grant me the courtesy of hearing the parameters first.”

She offered a vague, dismissive grunt. “You can say whatever you want, and I will maintain my absolute right to deny the request.”

Lucas kept his eyes pinned to her face, his expression striking a tone of profound, unyielding seriousness when he spoke. “Can you grant me a single month? Just thirty days of your time to be by my side.”

“I already told you my answer is a flat refu…”

“I only have a month left to live.”

She snapped onto her feet instantly, her entire body jerking upright as her eyes widened in complete, unadulterated shock.

Lucas merely looked back at her, his demeanor perfectly placid, as though he hadn’t just dropped a catastrophic, life-shattering statement into the quiet of the night.

A small smile played on his lips.

Yet the expression looked incredibly strained and hollow, a pathetic imitation of real warmth.

Tammy stared down at him in a dead freeze, her jaw dropping slightly as her throat locked, rendering her entirely unable to force a single syllable past her teeth.

She dragged a long, ragged breath into her lungs, her voice trembling with rising anger. “Are you actually desperate enough to invent a lethal clinical diagnosis just to manipulate my feelings?”

Without offering a verbal defense, Lucas reached up with a steady hand, gripped the edge of his dark hair, and smoothly peeled the synthetic piece away from his scalp.

His head was completely bald.

Tammy’s mind went entirely blank in an instant, a sharp, piercing screech vibrating violently in her ears.

“You… you…”

“It’s an aggressive brain tumor,” he explained calmly, lifting a finger to tap a specific coordinate along the lateral curvature of his skull.

“Right at this coordinate, an active mass roughly the size of a quail’s egg has established itself. The positioning is abysmal, woven directly into critical vascular structures. If I authorize a surgical extraction. the statistical probability of a successful outcome is a flat thirty percent.”

Thirty percent.

Operating as a trained medical practitioner herself, she understood the precise clinical reality behind. those metrics with absolute clarity. A thirty percent margin was nothing more than a superficial buffer

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Chapter 616A Sentence Beyond Regist

used to placate distraught family members before a terminal procedure.

In his specific chart, it was the exact equivalent of a death warrant.

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