Chapter 2
Holy cr ap!!!
Was he kissing her dead body? Did he have a thing for corpses?!
Xanthea, shivering with horror, saw Orion not only bizarrely kiss the girl’s lips for a long while but also picked up her lifeless body and headed towards the Rolls-Royce.
What in the world did he want with her body? Wasn’t kissing her enough, now he wanted. to take her home for some sick game?
Fuming to the point of nearly exploding, Xanthea was about to follow when suddenly her soul got sucked into the knife Orion was holding. When she was released again, she found herself in the chilling breeze of a pitch-dark rooftop.
As Xanthea realized it was a rooftop, her spirit trembled.
This was the very rooftop where Xanthea had caught Matthew and Miranda in the middle of a disgraceful scene and was then pushed off the building.
Two people, one was her longtime beloved fiancé and the other was her stepsister who she trusted implicitly had betrayed her in the cruelest way. She despised them!
But this wasn’t the Nightshade Group’s rooftop; their building had only twenty-six floors. This place had a towering sixty-six floors, and the neon logo shining on the building. opposite was the emblem of Crestwood – the Lockwood Group Twin Towers!
“Oh, please, let me go; let me go, please.”
A familiar voice came from behind. Xanthea quickly turned around to see two people, their limbs tightly bound with nylon ropes and covered in blood, kneeling and begging pitifully.
Matthew and Miranda! What were they doing here looking like this?
As she looked past them, Orion’s tall silhouette cast a dark shadow on Matthew and Miranda’s faces. Content from NôvelDr(a)ma.Org.
His fingers were embedded with a blade that was slowly dripping blood, like a demon king who had just walked out of hell, his entire aura dark and ominous. Under Miranda’s terrified gaze, he lifted her to the edge of the rooftop, slicing her face open blade by blade. “Ah!!!”
Miranda’s screams were heart-wrenching, and Xanthea was so frightened that her soul nearly s cattered.
Orion, how could he…
Wasn’t he supposed to be infatuated with Miranda? Even Xanthea, who paid no mind to
celebrity gossip, had heard about his grand pursuits. How could he now treat her so brutally? Miranda had always been so proud of her looks since young.
In the next second, Miranda’s figure vanished from the sixty-sixth floor, shocking Xantheal into near paralysis. Matthew, who was kneeling on the ground, fainted from fear.
He pushed Miranda off the building? From the sixty-sixth floor!
To him, the woman disappearing seemed as trivial as a passing breeze. Then, he grabbed
Matthew.
As Matthew’s body dangled over the edge, Xanthea noticed that he was already terribly wounded, his body a bl oody mess.
Orion looked at the man who seemed already dead, his eyes filled with cold fury, like a dark net of twisted hatred, his knuckles cracking audibly.
“Matthew, even sneaking a peek at Xan from afar, I’d feel it’s a luxury; how dare you!”
In a moment, Matthew too plummeted from the high-rise.
Xanthea watched in shock; for a second, the scene was eerily reminiscent of her own death, only theirs more tragic.
The cutting wind swept over Twin Towers, and on the rooftop, the man slowly wiped the murky blood from his fingers, his violent expression fading into a look of soft longing, “Xan, I’ll come to join you.”
He wiped the last drop of blood from his hand and pulled out the knife, pressing it against his major artery.
“No!”
“Xan, you’re awake! Thank goodness, you scared me to death!”
“Xan, don’t be scared. I’m here; it’s all right now.”
With a scream, the figure in the bed slowly opened her eyes to see a few anxious faces.
Her dad Christopher, mom Susanna, brothers Ethan and Samuel? Xanthea stared blankly, blinking.
Was she hallucinating? How could she see them all? And all so young – seeing her father was one thing, but wasn’t her mother critically ill from stress? Ethan had gone abroad for treatment, and Samuel had become comatose trying to save her.
“Xan, what’s wrong? Did something scare you?”
Samuel, seeing her dazed expression, quickly touched her forehead while Susanna wiped away tears, scolding Christopher, “It’s all your fault, insisting on holding Xan’s coming-of-age ceremony at Lakeside Manor, knowing full well she’s terrified of water. Falling into the lake must have terrified her. If anything had happened to her, I would never
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forgive you!”
“I’m so sorry, my dear; it’s all my fault.”
Feeling the warmth of Samuel’s palm on her forehead, Xanthea listened to her parents’ familiar voices, her pupils suddenly trembling.
She quickly pinched herself on the thigh..
Ouch! It was real; all of this was actually happening!
She had returned to the day of her coming-of-age celebration right after college graduation. Go d had truly given her a chance to start over!
Now, her mother wasn’t yet critically ill, Ethan Hadn’t had to go abroad for treatment, and Samuel was alive and well.
With that thought, Xanthea suddenly burst into tears and threw herself into Samuel’s arms, sobbing uncontrollably, “Samuel, Samuel!”