Chapter 7
Chapter 7
A thin line of blood ran down between my fingers.
He didn't seem to feel the pain. He just kept looking straight at me.
He didn't leave. He didn't move.
My parents watched in fear as I pushed the blade harder.
"When I saved you, you told me you had no family, no one."
"After we bonded, I picked out every single thing in our home with my own hands. My parents treated you like their own son."
"And what did you do to me?"
"You called me ungrateful, pressured me the day I was in labor, used my mother's health to threaten me..."
I said it word by word.
The blade in my hand slowly turned around. I pointed it at myself.
"If you won't leave, Cain — then let me go."
"Ivy!"
Cain finally broke.
He begged without any order to it, and kept slamming his head to the floor.
Hard. Over and over.
Nothing in the room but the hollow sound of it.
In the end, my parents pushed him out together.
My father gave him a hard kick.
"You animal! You deserve every circle of hell for what you did to Ivy and that pup!"
"Pay for it with your life!"
Cain, chalk-white, crumpled like something had been pulled from his spine.
That night, a video arrived on my phone.
Someone had drugged Serena's three pups.
Three days later.
When Cain went to the hospital, I was already gone.
He immediately turned his car around and drove to my parents' house.
The whole way there he kept going over it in his head — what to say, how to beg.
What would it take to get her back.
Part of him felt almost relieved.
Thank the Moon Goddess they had officially bonded. No matter how angry she was, no matter how many times she'd told him to get out, she had never once said she wanted to break the Bond.
"She still cares about me. She still loves me."
He kept repeating it to himself as he drove, a kind of desperate quiet chant.
He thought of something.
Right after they'd bonded, he'd gone on a trip and caught an infection, running a fever the whole time.
She'd come to him halfway in tears.
When she saw him, she pretended the wind had gotten in her eyes and tried to look like she wasn't worried.
"I'm not crying because I was scared. It was just the wind."
"Promise me — no more fevers in the middle of nowhere, no more collapsing on some hill, no more losing too much blood. Things like that."
"Because I'll worry. I'll be angry. And I'll never forgive you."
There it was. She'd given him the answer back then.
He just hadn't been paying attention. He hadn't cared enough to hear it.
And because of that, he'd missed the truth when it was right in front of him.
Cain thought about it and the tears wouldn't stop.
He wanted so badly to go back. Back to that scorching, empty hillside.
He would hold her tight and tell her.
If he ever got another chance, he wouldn't get it wrong again.
With that thought, he knocked on the door of the Colton house.
He knocked once. He knocked again.
No one came.
The patrol guard found him there and said: "Mr. Thorne, the Colton family moved out yesterday. The house is empty now."
"Also, Miss Colton left a letter for you."
Cain tore it open and read it in seconds.
A moment later the paper spun from his fingers and drifted to the ground.
The impact hit him like a physical force.
The light in front of him suddenly went too bright.
He felt like he was standing somewhere years back, at dusk.
Pale-faced, he reached out blindly.
His body swayed. He fainted.
The next time Cain Thorne made the news, three years had passed.
Ivy and her parents had long since moved to a neighboring territory.
They had a small flower shop there.
She tended to the flowers every day. Her parents helped with the watering.
Life moved slowly, and that was fine.
Then one day, browsing online, they came across the news: Serena had stabbed Cain.
Twelve times.
She had gone in with nothing left to lose.
The outcome was almost inevitable.
Cain died on the spot — she'd hit a major artery, and he bled out.
Serena was sentenced to life.
As for the three pups — no one knew where they went.
Some said Cain had gotten rid of them in a moment of madness.
Some said they were sent to an orphanage.
Nobody knew what Ivy had written in the letter she'd left for Cain through the guard.
The truth was, it wasn't much.
She felt sorry for him and wanted to give him one last piece of honesty.
As it turned out, Serena hadn't lied.
Those three pups were his.
This time, it was Ivy who had lied.