Chapter 3

Maya, the Beta, still wanted to stop him, but Oliver warned her off with a single look.

"If I don't teach her a real lesson this time, she'll go on bullying people forever. I've already got the Pack's best doctor waiting at the door, and the frostbite potion is ready. What could possibly go wrong?"

Powerful Alpha pressure rolled off Oliver, and the Beta had no choice but to obey.

He had people throw more ice blocks into the glass room.

They lowered the temperature another 36 degrees.

One of the men, still not satisfied, even fetched a basin of cold water and poured it straight over my head.

I wanted to scream that I was pregnant, but I simply couldn't make a sound.

My skin felt pierced by countless ice needles, nailing me to the floor.

The cold burrowed into every crack between my bones and froze my blood into slush ice.

I looked down at my swollen belly.

I didn’t know how long I’d been trapped in this glass freezer room.

My lips were purple, and frost had formed on my lashes.

My fingertips had long since lost all feeling.

To protect the little life inside me, I tried to use the last of my strength to shift position.

But even a single rise and fall of my chest brought the faint sound of skin tearing.

Each time, it left another patch of dark red stuck to the ice.

I didn't know if I imagined it, but my belly suddenly felt strangely empty.

I ignored the searing pain of my flesh tearing loose.

Inch by inch, I dragged my stiff, deadened body across the floor.

I forced my belly toward the last bit of warmth left at my chest.

Across the once-clear ice, patches of crimson slowly bloomed.

At last I curled myself into a shape that could shield the baby.

By then the entire sheet of ice had been stained a horrifying dark red.

The people outside who had been mocking me a moment ago looked at the bloody scene and finally fell silent.

I stared hard at Oliver beyond the glass, without an ounce of strength left in me.

I forced myself to push the words I needed to say through our mind-link.

"We have a child. I'm pregnant. If my baby doesn't make it out of this freezer alive, then you, its own father, are the one who killed it. I'll curse you before the Moon Goddess, and I'll curse you to die without peace."

But he looked completely calm.

That was when I realized he seemed to have cut the link between us.

He hadn't heard a single word I said.

Oliver stared at me, badly shaken.

He seemed to be trying to read my condition from all the blood on the floor.

Oliver lifted a hand and pointed at his own head, as if he meant to restart the mind-link.

But before he could, the Beta suddenly spoke.

"Alpha, the guards report seeing the Lancaster family's private jet pass along their exclusive flight path."

At those words Oliver's face changed abruptly, and he slammed a fist against the glass with a roar.

"Grace Lancaster. So that's it. You want to hold your bloodline over me for the rest of my life?"

I had no strength left to argue back.

Sophia quickly stepped forward to calm Oliver down.

She turned her head, looking at me with a wounded face, and couldn't resist throwing out an accusation.

"Luna, I know you don't think you did anything wrong. But why torture the man you love? You know how much pain and humiliation Oliver suffered while your father was in power. Now your father is gone and the Lancaster family has fallen, so are you doing all of this just to humiliate him?"

With that, Sophia gently took his hand.

"Enough. This whole circus started because of me. Let her out, before something truly goes wrong and we become the guilty ones. I know our Luna has never once seen lowborn blood like ours as worth anything."

Sophia's words made Oliver finally erupt, and his Alpha power sent a shudder through everyone present.

He let out a loud curse, then spun around and barked coldly at the people behind him.

"The freezer. Drop it to minus 100. Now."

No one dared defy him, and they quickly drove the temperature down.

In an instant, the biting cold wrapped around me from every direction.

Every inch of my skin felt scraped by blades of ice.

I shook so hard that even my breathing came out in broken moans.

My teeth chattered in a frantic, clicking rhythm.

As my mind began to blur, a tearing cramp ripped through my lower belly.

I propped myself up on shaking arms and looked down to see dark red blood winding its way down my thigh.

It spread across the deathly white ice, faint steam rising off it.

The warm liquid quickly ate through the frost beneath me and dripped, drop by drop, into the deeper cracks.

At last I understood what was happening.

In that bone-deep cold, the tiny life inside me was already slipping away.

Quietly, it had torn loose from my body for good.

I cupped my belly, looked at my blood-soaked hands, and couldn't keep my voice from shaking.

"The baby. My baby. Somebody save my baby."

He had been furiously berating me a moment ago, but at the sight of so much blood, even he panicked.

The blood flooding the floor threw Oliver into a complete panic.

He pointed a shaking finger at the electronic lock on the glass door, his shout rattling the panes.

"Hurry, open the class freezer! Didn't we ask the doctor before we put her in, and didn't he say there'd be no problem? So how did it come to this?"