Chapter 6
1011 Words
The next day, I developed a high fever, just as expected.
The exhaustion of the past few days, the alcohol, and the humiliation from the night before had finally taken their toll on me.
I drifted in and out of consciousness, burning with fever, as if I were trapped in a nightmare.
Lucian never left my side. He kept changing the cooling compresses to bring down my fever, then fed me spoonful after spoonful of warm broth.
In my haze, I felt his phone vibrate beside the pillow.
He seemed to think I was asleep. He picked up the phone, got up quietly, and went outside to answer it.
The soundproofing in the basement room was terrible.
I vaguely heard his voice, deliberately lowered and icy enough to make my bones ache.
"I don't care what methods you use. Before sunrise, I want to see the Hayes family bankrupt. And as for Preston himself... Find out which hand he used to touch her last night. Then ruin that hand. Keep it clean. Leave no trace."
His voice was extremely cold. It carried the cruelty and violence of someone used to deciding who lived and who died, a side of him I had never heard before.
He was nothing like the gentle, obedient, sweet-faced childhood sweetheart who cried and begged in front of me.
My eyes flew open. In that instant, it felt as if all the blood in my body had frozen.
Was I hallucinating?
No. Impossible.
That voice had been so clear, it might as well have sounded right beside my ear.
Over the next few days, I pretended I was still sick and lay weakly in bed, watching him without letting on.
He was still the same gentle, considerate, submissive man.
He fed me, wiped me down, and even when I accidentally broke a bowl, he nervously knelt on the floor at once to pick up the shards, afraid I would cut my hand, and even more afraid that I would get angry.
That humble look was so real that I began to wonder whether I had truly burned out my brain that night and imagined the whole thing.
A week later, once I had mostly recovered, I went to the bar to pick up my final wages and quit.
I never wanted to live like that again.
The moment Rita saw me, she looked as if she had seen a savior. No, the queen herself.
She hurried toward me with a fawning smile plastered across her face. She looked nothing like the woman I had known before.
"Oh, Evie! Why did you come in person? For a little thing like this, you only needed to call!"
Bowing and scraping, she welcomed me into her office.
"Evie, your wages have already been deposited into your account. On top of that, the company gave you an extra 100,000 dollars as compensation for emotional distress," Rita said while wiping cold sweat from her forehead.
I frowned. The uneasy feeling in my chest grew stronger and stronger.
"What happened to Preston?" I asked coldly.
Rita's face went white at once. She lowered her voice and spoke in a hushed, secretive tone.
"Evie, you... you don't know? The Hayes family went bankrupt overnight! I heard they offended some terrifying big shot. Assets seized, arrests made, the whole family is finished! And Mr. Hayes is even worse. The night before last, someone put a sack over his head in an alley. Both his hands... both of them were smashed to pieces. The bones were exposed. He is still in the ICU. The doctors said he is ruined for life!"
Boom.
It felt as if thunder had exploded inside my head.
Coincidence?
How could there be such a coincidence in the world?
What I had heard that night wasn't a hallucination at all.
I didn't go home. I rushed straight to a 24-hour internet café.
I logged into a private forum I used back when I still moved in trust-fund circles and began frantically searching for news about the Blackwell family's bankruptcy.
A year ago, the Blackwell family had indeed suffered an unprecedented business crisis, but every report was vague, as if someone had deliberately suppressed the details.
I followed the clues and found the shadow consortium that had finally stepped in to acquire all of Blackwell Group's assets.
It was called Ascendant Capital, a financial giant that had risen out of nowhere in Blackridge within the past year. It was ruthless, mysterious, and untouchable.
The beneficial owner of Ascendant Capital was an offshore account buried under layer after layer of encryption.
I stared at the screen, took a deep breath, and started using the little hacking skills I had once learned to track Lucian's movements. I tried to trace the account activity.
Lines of code streamed across the screen. My heart raced along with it.
At last, a red dot flashed on the map of Blackridge.
It was located at a top-tier office tower.
That was... Blackwell Tower, the former headquarters of Blackwell Group.
A terrifying suspicion took root in my mind and grew wildly, choking me until I could barely breathe.
I stumbled back to the dark basement room.
Lucian wasn't home.
Like a lunatic, I began tearing through everything.
Finally, under a loose floor tile beneath his bed, I found a hidden compartment.
Inside was a pitch-black encrypted laptop with no logo of any kind.
I took it out. My hands shook so badly I could barely hold it.
I took a deep breath and entered my birthday with trembling fingers.
System: Password incorrect.
I bit my lip and entered his birthday.
System: Password incorrect.
My heart sank little by little.
As if possessed, I entered the date I would never forget.
It was October 24, one year ago, the day I stabbed him and sent myself to prison.
With a soft chime, the computer unlocked.
The desktop was clean. There was only one lonely folder.
The folder name "The Cage" sent me plunging into cold dread, my blood turning to ice.
- Writer
