Chapter 2

"Damon, please don't. It'll hurt her," Lily gasped in mock dismay, though the corner of her lips twitched upward into a barely perceptible smirk.

"Hurt? If she knew what was good for her, she'd accept reality!" Damon glared at me as if I were a pile of rotting garbage. "Sloane, consider this a warning. If you don't sign that paper, I will cut off all your medical treatments right now and unplug your IV pain pump. Let's see how many days you can last then!"

A violent shudder wrecked through my body as tears finally spilled over.

It wasn't because of the physical agony from my wounds. It was the suffocating despair and absolute humiliation of being utterly betrayed and trampled on by my own flesh and blood.

"Let's go, Lily." Without sparing me a single glance, Damon turned and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. "We fly to New York tomorrow. A top-tier designer has your wedding dress ready. Don't waste your breath on a piece of trash who doesn't know what's good for her."

Pausing at the door, Damon threw one last freezing remark over his shoulder: "I'll have Aunt Martha come look after you for the next few days. I hope you've learned to be a little smarter by the time I get back from New York."

My pupils violently constricted. Martha was the most greedy, vicious woman in our family. Damon hadn't called her here to look after me—he brought her here to torture me into submission.

The door slammed shut. The only sounds left in the hollow room were the cold, rhythmic beeping of the monitors and the steady drip of blood falling from my hand onto the sheets.

I collapsed limply against the bed, feeling the abyss of despair slowly swallowing me whole.

Less than two hours after Damon left, the ward door was roughly shoved open.

Aunt Martha strutted in on her high heels, swaying her thick waist.

"Well, would you look at our once high-and-mighty heiress. How did you turn into such a ghastly freak?" Aunt Martha stepped up to the bed, making no effort to hide the sheer glee in her eyes.

Her gaze then drifted to the patient-controlled pain pump hooked up to my body.

"Damon made it perfectly clear. If you don't behave, you need to be taught a lesson." With that, she reached over and hit the power button on the machine, turning it off.

Minutes later, as the medication wore off, the agonizing pain from my shattered bones and deep lacerations flared up, feeling like a million fire ants gnawing at my marrow.

The excruciating agony swallowed me like a tsunami. My entire body went into violent spasms. Huge drops of cold sweat rolled down my face, and I bit my lip so hard that blood streamed down my chin.

"So pathetic," Martha mocked.

"Wouldn't this all be over if you just signed the agreement? You just had to cling to that position. Think about it—Lily is the apple of Damon's eye now. Who the hell do you think you are?"

I was in so much pain I was on the verge of passing out, my vision blurring in and out.

At that moment, Martha cast a disgusted look around the ward, clearly sick of the smell of disinfectant.

She immediately called in two burly bodyguards and ordered them to force my discharge.

"What do you think you're doing? The patient is extremely weak. She cannot be discharged under any circumstances!" The attending physician rushed in upon hearing the commotion, furiously trying to block them.

"Get out of my way!" Martha arrogantly slapped a check right into the doctor's face. "Where our family chooses to rest is none of an outsider's damn business!"

And just like that, treated like a battered piece of garbage, the bodyguards forcefully ripped the remaining tubes from my body and roughly chucked me into the back of a car.

The car bumped and jostled for three agonizing hours before dumping my half-dead body at the family's old, gloomy, and horribly damp estate in the suburbs.

There were no nurses, not a single painkiller, and no antibiotics.

Martha threw me half a rock-hard bun and a bowl of sour, stagnant water every day, leaving the wounds over my shattered bones to fester, ooze pus, and emit a sickening stench.

A raging fever kept me semi-conscious day and night. The bone-deep agony made me wish I were dead.

The next day, taking advantage of Martha stepping out, I fumbled out the backup phone I had secretly hidden in the lining of my clothes and dialed Damon's number.

It rang for a long time before he finally picked up. Damon's highly irritated voice came through: "Sloane, what kind of trick are you trying to pull now?"

"Damon... please, save me..." I was so weak my teeth were chattering. "Martha stopped my meds... she locked me in the old estate... my wounds are infected, I'm really going to die..."

"Die?" Damon sneered, his voice completely stripped of warmth. "You can actually make up a lie this pathetic? Martha reports to me every single day. She says you're full of energy. Sloane, drop this disgusting pity act. I'm not buying it!"

The call was ruthlessly cut off.

I gripped the phone stiffly, my entire body plummeting into a bottomless ice cave.

A second later, a notification popped up at the top of the screen—a new post from my 'Favorites'.

With a trembling hand, I clicked on it. It was a photo Damon had just uploaded.

The shot was taken in a dazzling, ultra-luxurious bridal boutique. Damon was half-kneeling on the floor, his eyes brimming with utter adoration as he personally arranged the train of Lily's custom wedding gown.

Staring at that blinding display of happiness on the screen, I closed my eyes in despair, gasping for air. The pain that exploded in my chest was a hundred times more devastating than the physical agony of my fractured limbs.

Suddenly, the door was viciously kicked open.

Martha strode in with a glass of red wine in hand, instantly spotting the glowing screen in my grip.