Chapter 5

Stella POV

“Want to sleep? Want to escape?” Ethan grabbed my hair, dragging me back to the living room and roughly shoving me in front of the coffee table. “Tonight, you’ll stay here and finish Chloe’s memorial hall blueprints! If they’re not done, you’re not going anywhere!”

He threw a stack of blank blueprints and pencils in front of me.

I slumped to the floor, the intense stomach pain engulfing me like a tsunami. I was shaking all over, my breathing heavy and tasting of blood.

“My… my hand is burned…” I lifted my swollen, blistered right hand, my voice trembling uncontrollably. “I can’t hold the pencil…”

“Hold it even if you can’t!” Ethan didn’t even glance at my hand, his voice devoid of warmth. “Stella, don’t make me use uglier methods.”

I looked at the cold, ruthless man before me, the light in my eyes dimming bit by bit.

I stopped speaking and silently picked up the pencil.

The moment I exerted force with my right hand, the scalded blisters burst. A sharp, piercing pain made me gasp.

I bit down hard, gripping the pencil tightly, and hunched over the coffee table, beginning to draw.

Large drops of cold sweat splattered onto the blueprints, smearing the pencil lines. The cramping in my stomach made me pause for a long time to catch my breath after every stroke.

Ethan sat on the sofa, watching me with cold eyes.

He watched my trembling shoulders, my pale face, the blood from my right hand staining the white blueprints. He seemed to think it was all my fault, that having killed Chloe, this suffering was nothing. I could even feel his growing irritation.

The entire night.

I finished the last blueprint in this extreme agony.

When the first ray of morning sun streamed into the living room, I finally put down the pencil.

“It’s done,” I whispered weakly, collapsing onto the carpet like a broken rag doll.

Ethan walked over, picked up the stack of blueprints stained with blood and sweat, and quickly glanced at them.

They were perfectly drawn. A perfect recreation of that desperate underground theater.

He looked at me, lying there half-dead, and seemed to grow even more irritated.

“Get up,” he nudged my leg. “Today is Chloe’s death anniversary.”

I closed my eyes, unmoving.

I no longer had the strength to even open them.

“I told you to get up!” Ethan bent down, roughly hauling me off the floor. “You’re coming with me.”

The mountain road was winding, with many sharp turns.

This was the most dangerous road on the outskirts of New York, with steep cliffs on one side and a bottomless abyss on the other.

Ethan parked the black sports car at the starting point.

He shoved me into the driver’s seat and got into the passenger seat himself.

“Chloe was in that fire, watching the flames consume her little by little. You can’t imagine that fear of waiting for death,” Ethan turned his head, looking at my paper-pale face, a twisted, cruel smile playing on his lips.

“Today, I’m going to let you experience what it’s like to be one step away from death.”

He pointed at the winding, unguarded cliff road ahead.

“Hit the gas. Don’t go below seventy miles per hour. Drive to the summit.”

My hands on the steering wheel were shaking violently.

The stomach pain had clouded my mind, and my vision was blurring. In this state, driving seventy miles per hour along a cliff edge was suicide.

“Ethan…” I turned to look at him. “We’ll die.”

“Scared?” Ethan’s eyes were full of mockery and the thrill of revenge. “Good. Chloe was a thousand, a million times more terrified than you are now!”

“Drive!” he roared.