Chapter 4
Adrian's head snapped up. The eyes that had been cloudy with a hangover seconds ago were now flooded with a terrifying crimson.
A split second later, a roar tore from his throat.
"Serena!"
The sound was so raw, so unhinged, that everyone in the City Hall lobby flinched.
Adrian didn't hesitate. He seized my wrist in a grip tight enough to snap the bone.
"Elinor, if anything happens to Serena today, I will erase you from this country. Just like your father."
He glared at me through gritted teeth, the whites of his eyes mapped with broken blood vessels.
In the ten years I've known Adrian, even during hostile takeovers, I had never seen him look like this.
He didn't wait for an explanation. He dragged me out of the hall like a rag doll, shoving me roughly into the back of his Maybach.
The door slammed. The engine roared. We tore through the streets, speeding maniacally toward the penthouse.
The bathroom was dead silent, the air heavy with the metallic tang of rust.
The bathwater was stained a shocking, opaque crimson, as if Serena had bled out completely. Her face was ashen, gray as a corpse. Her soaked white dress floated half-submerged, limp and lifeless.
A bloody eyebrow razor lay on the tiles. Her phone screen was still lit, displaying her forged "suicide note."
Adrian's legs gave out the moment he rushed in. He practically slid on his knees to the tub's edge.
"Serena! Wake up! It's me, Adrian. I'm not getting married. Screw the merger, screw the family legacy! As long as you're alive, I'll never marry anyone but you!"
His hands trembled as he scooped her up, his voice cracking with a terror and tenderness I had never heard him direct at me.
Serena's eyes were closed, her eyelashes fluttering faintly. She looked fragile, like a glass doll on the verge of shattering.
Suddenly, Adrian whipped his head around. If looks could kill, I would have been flayed alive.
"Elinor! Are you satisfied now? You just had to push her to the brink of death to secure your spot as Mrs. Thorne, didn't you?"
"What did she ever do wrong? Aside from loving me, has she ever hurt you?!"
Every word was a serrated blade twisting in my heart.
Adrian had never trusted me. Not for a single second.
I swallowed the bile rising in my throat, clutching the doorframe to stay upright against the waves of pain. My gaze drifted past them, landing on Serena's tightly clenched fist.
Glinting there was a deep, mesmerizing green—Grandmother's emerald brooch.
"I don't give a damn about marrying you," my voice was raspy as I took a step forward. "I just want back what is mine."
I reached out. My fingertips were inches from Serena's hand.
Adrian looked up. In his eyes, I must have looked like a vulture pecking at a fresh corpse.
"Don't touch her with your filthy hands!"
With a low growl of pure rage, Adrian didn't let me explain. Acting on instinct, he shoved me away. Hard.
My body, hollowed out by illness, couldn't withstand that kind of violence. I was thrown backward, crashing heavily onto the unforgiving marble floor.
SNAP.
A crisp, sickening crack echoed through the bathroom.
Agony exploded in my brain, instantly turning my vision white. Cold sweat drenched my back.
I knew exactly what had happened.
My left leg.
Bone cancer had long since eaten away the marrow, leaving my skeleton as brittle as dry twigs. It couldn't withstand a simple fall, let alone this.
I gasped for air, mouth wide, the pain so blinding I couldn't even scream. I could only stare at him in mute despair.
Adrian didn't show a flicker of guilt. Instead, he sneered.
"Stop the act. You can't handle a little shove?"
He pried the expensive brooch from Serena's hand, strode over to me, and looked down with eyes as cold as glacial ice.
"Your father was a servant his whole life. He knew his place. How did he spawn something as greedy as you?"
He looked me over with utter disgust. "You want this? You think you deserve this?"
He opened his hand.
The brooch fell to the floor.
Then, his expensive leather sole slammed down on it, grinding hard.
The fragile emerald shattered into fragments beneath his heel, turning into trash along with the last shred of my hope.
"Since you care so much about this junk, you can pick it up and glue it back together yourself."
I lay on the floor, trembling, tears streaming uncontrollably as I tried to reach for the green shards with shaking fingers.
Seeing me in this pathetic state seemed to trigger the resentment Adrian had been bottling up for a decade.
"You think just because you hold some ancient contract from my grandfather, I should be grateful? If I had known the price of being saved was being shackled to a leech like you for ten years, I would have preferred to die back then!"
"Your father called sacrificing his life an honor, but for me? It's been a living hell! Why should I have to suffer you just because of a piece of paper?"
Those words hurt more than the broken leg.
So, the last ten years were just... suffering.
I wanted to explain. I wanted to tell him I never intended to weaponize the past. But the metallic taste of blood in my throat choked the words back.
Just then, the bodyguard stationed at the door screamed.
"Mr. Thorne! Miss Serena—she's crashing!"
Panic seized Adrian instantly. He whipped off his coat to wrap around Serena.
"Since you love driving people to despair, why don't you taste it yourself?"
He strode over to the floor-to-ceiling glass doors leading to the terrace and shoved them wide open.
WHOOSH—
The wind screamed like a banshee, instantly devouring the warmth in the room. The Manhattan blizzard howled into the apartment.
I curled up on the cold floor, convulsing from the agony of the broken bone and the brutal freeze. My shaking hand fumbled into my pocket, pulling out my bottle of painkillers.
"Still trying to take meds?"
Adrian walked over and kicked the bottle out of my hand.
It arced through the air and landed squarely in a snowdrift on the terrace.
"You want your pills? Crawl out there and get them."
He looked down at me, his gaze void of humanity.
"Reflect on the despair Serena felt in that tub. Stay here until you learn how to be a human being."
As he reached the main door, he paused, throwing one final verdict over his shoulder:
"I'm notifying Grandfather tomorrow morning. The engagement is off. Elinor, this marriage was a mistake from the start. I should have fixed it years ago."
With that, he kicked my phone across the floor, sending it skittering out of reach, severing my last lifeline.
BANG.
The heavy door slammed shut.
I began to drift, suspended between excruciating pain and numbing cold. I stared at the empty room. My tears froze on my cheeks before they could fall.
Maybe it's for the best.
Adrian finally regretted his decision.
But luckily... I had already made the choice for him from the beginning.
"The cuts are superficial. Not even worth a stitch."
The doctor pulled down his mask, his tone borderline dismissive. "She passed out from hyperventilation—a panic attack, essentially. The scratches on her wrist barely broke the skin. She just needs to sleep it off."
Adrian leaned back against the wall, the tension wire inside him finally going slack.
Thank God. Serena is okay.
The memory of that bathtub—water dyed a violent crimson—had nearly broken his mind.
But as his breathing steadied, rationality began to claw its way back.
In the antiseptic silence of the corridor, a sound he had subconsciously buried suddenly detonated in his memory.
—SNAP.
The sound of bone giving way. Like dry timber splitting.
It was followed by the howl of the blizzard, the bottle of painkillers spinning through the air, and the silhouette of the woman he had abandoned to the sub-zero wind.
Adrian's pupils constricted to pinpricks. A chill far deadlier than the storm outside shot up his spine.
He wheeled around, locking eyes with his head of security.
"Where is Elinor? Since we're here, have a team bring her in to set her leg. We'll get her patched up and be done with it."
The air in the hallway solidified.
The bodyguards exchanged terrified glances, faces draining of blood. Silence stretched, heavy and suffocating.
"Answer me!"
The head of security swallowed hard, his voice trembling. "Boss... you left in such a hurry... You didn't give the order."
"And... well, you said it was her punishment."
A deafening buzz filled Adrian's skull.
"So..." His voice was dry. "She is still there? In the apartment with the windows wide open?"
The bodyguard lowered his head. "Yes... assuming she hasn't crawled out yet."
The ER doctor, who had started to walk away, froze. He turned back slowly, a look of dawning horror on his face.
"Wait. Mr. Thorne, if you are referring to Miss Elinor... I need to remind you. As her primary physician, I diagnosed her with stage IV bone cancer last month."
Adrian went rigid, as if struck by lightning.
The doctor sighed, delivering the final, fatal blow:
"Her bones are currently as brittle as glass. Forget a fracture. Leaving a patient in her condition exposed to that temperature for even ten minutes?"
His eyes hardened.
"That's not punishment, Mr. Thorne. That's an execution."
