Chapter 2

Watching the Kane sisters shower Evan with such blatant favoritism felt like being plunged into a freezing lake.

Evan's question from moments ago echoed relentlessly in my mind.

How long would it take to replace me? The bitter truth was, they already had.

My chest tightened so much I couldn't breathe, let alone find the words to defend myself.

Suddenly, Evan scrambled up from the floor and dropped to his knees in front of me. "I'm so sorry, Declan! I didn't realize you'd be this angry about Amelia, Bethany, and Chloe throwing me a birthday party. It's all my fault. You told me to crawl out of this villa like a dog, right? I'll do it! Just please, don't make things hard for me anymore and don't break their hearts."

With that, he actually began to crawl toward the door.

The Kane sisters' faces shifted from pale to livid. Their eyes burned with rage as they glared at me.

I trembled, my mouth hanging open. But seeing that they were looking at me like I was their worst enemy, I felt a wave of desolation wash over me. I knew it didn't matter what I said. They wouldn't believe a single word of it.

…

Late into the night, the massive villa was a hive of activity.

The city's top medical team had been summoned just to examine Evan, while the Kane sisters hovered over him anxiously.

I stood a few feet away. My head throbbed with pain so intense that it felt like I was being torn in two, as if a dagger were twisting inside my mind, leaving me unable to stand upright.

Gritting my teeth, I approached one of the renowned neurosurgeons. "Doctor, my head hurts. I—"

"Declan, can you please grow up? These doctors are here for Evan. Stop being a nuisance. They had to come all this way in the middle of the night just to clean up your mess." Amelia's voice carried a hint of reproach.

When I didn't move, she stepped forward, grabbed my arm, shoved me into my room, then locked the door tightly behind me.

The pain was so agonizing that I couldn't even walk. I had to crawl to the nightstand to find my painkillers. I shook a handful of pills into my palm, shoved them into my mouth, and chewed them dry.

The bitterness coated my tongue, but it was nothing compared to the bitterness in my heart.

After my parents died in a car accident, my grandparents and I moved to this city and became neighbors with the Kanes.

They were a few years older than me and had always looked out for me.

When my grandparents passed away, they stepped up to take care of me.

I was 19 then. To take care of me, they knocked down the walls between our two villas and remodeled the entire place exactly how I liked it.

The four of us were the closest people in the world until Evan showed up.

It had started on an ordinary day when Evan fainted on our doorstep. I'd felt sorry for the scrawny young man and helped him inside.

From the very first moment the Kane sisters saw him, they started ignoring me. Over the following months, they poured every ounce of their affection into him.

It was as if he had appeared out of thin air specifically to steal their love.

The painkillers finally kicked in. I pushed myself up to lie on the bed, but the door was suddenly kicked open with a violent bang.

Bethany and Chloe stormed in, hurling a thick stack of papers into my face.

I was stunned. Before I could recover, they began to scream at me.

"Since when have you become so jealous and petty? How could you beat and berate Evan when we weren't home?"

"You've bullied him so badly that he's developed clinical depression! Declan, I never knew you could be this cruel."