Chapter 4

She lay in a pool of blood.

Her clothes had been torn away, her arms and legs brutally shattered. She was barely recognizable as a human being.

Yet when I pushed open the wardrobe door, she still used her final breath to whisper to me,

"Faith... live... Run..."

Those were the last words Anne ever spoke to me.

The memory froze there, cut short by my overwhelming resistance and unbearable pain.

The entire square fell silent.

Then came a tidal wave of outrage.

No one had expected that even after being tortured into such a horrific state, Anne was still trying to protect me.

"Oh my God! She was dying, and she was still telling her to run!"

"This Faith is unbelievable! Anne gave everything for her, and this is how she repays her?"

"How does someone like that deserve to live?"

With no way to vent their rage on me, some of the crowd turned their fury on my parents instead.

"You raised a daughter like this! You're no better!"

They began beating my mother and father.

My parents could only curl up and shield their heads as fists and kicks rained down on them.

I closed my eyes.

I couldn't bear to watch.

Daniel collapsed to his knees, sobbing so hard he could barely move.

"Anne adored you... Even with her dying breath, she was still worried about you...

"Faith... how could you do this to her?"

The excessive voltage had completely destroyed my spine.

I could no longer control my body.

All I could do was slump helplessly against the chair as tears streamed down my face.

My lips parted.

In a barely intelligible voice, I managed to force out a single sentence.

"I'm sorry..."

"...the time..."

"...hasn't come yet..."

The crowd below didn't catch the second half of my words.

They assumed it was nothing more than a hypocritical apology from a dying woman.

"Hypocrite!"

"What good is sorry now? Just die already!"

As curses echoed through the square, the memory replay above shifted to another scene.

At the time, I had not yet been arrested for destroying evidence, but news of my refusal to reveal the killer's identity had already spread.

The families of the other victims came looking for me.

More than a dozen of them gathered outside my door.

One after another, they dropped to their knees before me, crying and pleading.

"Miss Dean, we're begging you! Please tell us who that monster is!"

"We'll get on our knees and beg if we have to!"

Anyone who witnessed that scene would have felt nothing but heartbreak and sympathy, yet I rejected them and turned to leave.

The moment I did, a burlap sack was thrown over my head, and I was dragged away.

When I woke up again, I found myself tied up inside an abandoned warehouse.

Desperate to force the killer's identity out of me, they resorted to torture.

They severed the tendons in my wrists and ankles.

They used razor blades to slice strips of flesh from my body.

They even buried me alive, leaving only my head exposed above the ground.

The child growing inside me died because of it.

I nearly died as well.

But from beginning to end, I repeated only the same words.

"I'm sorry... Just wait a little longer..."

The audience erupted into discussion.

"My God... that's horrifying. They never should have taken the law into their own hands."

"But she deserved it! She protected a murderer!"

"Still... this should have been handled through proper legal channels."

"I don't know... the things she said at the end sounded like she was hiding something."

"Or maybe she's just a selfish ingrate making excuses to save herself."

At that moment, the machinery on the Judgment Platform emitted a piercing burst of static.