共有

Chapter 2

作者: Clear Spring
James froze, seemingly caught off guard by my refusal. He immediately became angry.

“Stop throwing a tantrum! You’re badly injured, and you’re refusing treatment? What on earth are you trying to pull?”

“James, please don’t be hard on Jean,” Chloe interjected softly.

“It’s all my fault. I shouldn’t have worn Jean’s necklace. I had no idea she would get so furious that she’d lose control of the car while driving.

“I thought if I died, it would serve as an apology to her. I never expected you to save me first. When we went back to get her, the car blew up. You were worried sick, James.

“Thank goodness a miracle happened, and Jean is still alive. Jean, please don’t refuse treatment out of spite. James will be worried.”

The tension on James’s face softened considerably.

“Jean, I was the one who allowed her to wear that necklace. You’ve grown up with so much. What’s wrong with giving her one thing? Was it really worth risking your life over a petty grievance? If it matters so much, I’ll just buy you another one.

“Besides, Lucas informed me that the kidnapping was staged. You were injured so badly in the crash, and instead of going straight to the hospital, you planned a fake kidnapping instead? I’m starting to think there’s something wrong with you.”

I looked over at Lucas, who shifted his eyes away guiltily. I didn’t know what he had told James, but somehow he had convinced the man that all the injuries on my body were solely from the car accident.

I stared at James and asked in a raspy voice, “If you think there’s something wrong with me, why do you automatically believe I’m capable of doing something like that?”

James blurted out, “You’ve been spoiled and willful since you were a child. Is there anything you wouldn’t do?”

I closed my eyes. Even though I remembered my true identity, the memories of living together for over a decade remained, and that comment hurt.

When our parents were still alive, I was the center of their universe. James had sworn he would protect me for the rest of his life and never let me suffer any injustice.

“My little sister deserves to have whatever she wants. As long as I’m here, you have every right to be as willful as you want.”

Yet now, not only was he accusing me of being willful, but he had also forgotten that the necklace Chloe was wearing could never be bought again.

I looked at James and said softly, “You gave me the necklace for my eighteenth birthday.”

It was designed by our mother herself before she passed away. James had said he hoped I would wear it so it would feel like our mother was still around.

However, I didn’t say it out loud because it didn’t matter anymore, not the necklace, not the loyalty of my bodyguard, and not my brother’s affection toward me. Whatever I couldn’t take with me, I didn’t want anymore.

A flash of guilt crossed James’s face.

Chloe quickly handed the necklace to me. “I’m sorry, Jean. I didn’t know this necklace meant so much to you. Please don’t be mad at James. If you want to blame someone, blame me…”

The second she placed the necklace in my hand, I gathered all my remaining strength and flung it away. Just like that, the necklace was thrown right out the window.

At the same time, the wounds across my body tore open, and blood poured out rapidly. Thankfully, the System was blocking my pain, though my face had turned deathly pale.

“Jean! Are you insane?” James roared as his eyes widened in shock.

“Ah! The necklace!” Chloe cried out. “That necklace costs a lot! What are we going to do if it’s lost? How could you throw away a gift James gave you? You’re going to break his heart!”

James’s face turned livid. “Lucas! Go down and search for it!”

Lucas immediately turned around and sprinted downstairs.

James looked at me with ultimate disappointment. “I wasn’t going to hold this reckless stunt against you! But look at you now. What have you turned into? If you love kicking up a fuss so much, then go right ahead!”

With that, he grabbed Chloe and walked out of the hospital room.

When James didn’t hear me admitting my mistake, he glanced back over his shoulder and was instantly scared out of his wits.

“Jean! What are you doing? Get down from there right now!”

この本を無料で読み続ける
コードをスキャンしてアプリをダウンロード

最新チャプター

  • The “Cannon Fodder-Real Heiress” Mission   Chapter 21

    I stood at the doorway of the living room, refraining from stepping inside.James was sitting on the sofa, his head lowered and his hands resting on his knees. When my mother handed him a cup of hot tea, he accepted it and murmured a quiet thank you. His voice was faint, sounding like someone who hadn’t spoken in a very long time.I didn’t know how much he still remembered. I had no idea how he ended up here, what role the System played in all of this, or what was currently left inside his mind. I just stood there, watching him.He looked far more haggard than I remembered. His suit was relatively neat, but there was a subtle wrinkle on his cuff, as if no one had cared for him in a while. Several small, scabbed-over wounds marked the back of his hand.In that moment, I suddenly recalled how, in that other world, James always maintained a flawless appearance. He had been the head of the Fox family, accustomed to standing at the front, giving orders, and being looked up to by everyon

  • The “Cannon Fodder-Real Heiress” Mission   Chapter 20

    When the System contacted me, I was chopping up some vegetables for my mother.An orange cat rubbed against my feet, the kitchen was filled with the smell of onion, and the TV in the background was playing some random variety show, punctuated by bursts of laughter.[System alert: Contractual mission rewards finalized. Transmitting final log.]My hands paused for a second, and I quietly walked back to my room, closing the door behind me.After returning to my original world, it had taken me a very long time to get used to this kind of peace and stability. Every evening when my father came home from work, he would bring me my favorite hot dog. My mother would nag about how lazy I was while always making sure I was fed.They were truly alive again. They would bicker, laugh, and argue in the kitchen over which herbs to add, and they would take turns knocking on my door whenever I stayed up late. Every detail was so real that it terrified me. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle o

  • The “Cannon Fodder-Real Heiress” Mission   Chapter 19

    After the coin vanished, James became a different person entirely.It wasn’t a mental breakdown, nor was he spiraling out of control. It was something far more agonizing—he had finally found clarity. He was as sharp as a knife that had been honed to a dangerous edge, cutting through anything while simultaneously cutting himself.He knew that I was dead. He knew that he had been manipulated for those three years, and that his actions during that time had not entirely been driven by his own free will.He knew that something beyond his understanding existed in this world, that Chloe had been fabricated into their lives, and that I might have never truly belonged there in the first place. All that clarity only led him to confirm the truth that I was never coming back.That night, he sat in his study until dawn. Outside the window, the sky shifted from a deep navy blue to a pale gray before finally turning light gold. However, he didn’t move an inch.Spread across his desk was a thick

  • The “Cannon Fodder-Real Heiress” Mission   Chapter 18

    James spent a long time looking into the origin of that coin, but he found no answers.No one in the Fox family knew where it had come from. The butler said he had never seen it, his assistant swore he had never touched it, and the security footage showed no one entering or leaving James’s room. It had simply appeared there one morning out of nowhere.James carried it with him everywhere, as if holding onto something he couldn’t quite put into words.During that period, his state of mind was hard to describe. On the surface, he handled company affairs as usual, attended necessary events, signed documents, held meetings, and made executive decisions. Yet, he began to question the nature of reality itself.If Chloe could be fabricated into existence out of thin air, if his willpower could be overwritten by an external force for three whole years, and if a shadow on a security feed could be in the wrong direction, was the ground beneath his feet even real? Was the torment he felt ever

  • The “Cannon Fodder-Real Heiress” Mission   Chapter 17

    James started doing things that made everyone around him think he’d gone mad. I only knew about it in intermittent bursts through the System’s residual signal, like a radio stuck between channels, picking up scattered fragments.He kept my bedroom exactly as it had been, untouched. Every day, he would personally replace the flowers with fresh roses—the blush-pink ones I loved most when I was alive. They bloomed in full, their scent filling the room. He would stand before my framed photo and speak to it, giving me a detailed rundown of everything that happened that day. For example, how many people visited the foundation, whether the weather was cloudy or clear, what he ate for lunch, and where things stood with Chloe’s court case.He would take all the items I had carelessly left lying around while I was alive and carefully put them back into their original places.On the third shelf of the bookcase sat an old fairy tale book with a worn cover and curled edges. That was the book h

  • The “Cannon Fodder-Real Heiress” Mission   Chapter 16

    James read through half of those documents before he stopped. It wasn’t absurd. In fact, it was frighteningly accurate.Folklore, metaphysical texts, fringe quantum theories, and even extreme psychiatric case studies repeatedly described a shared phenomenon: when an external force forcibly intervened in a person’s life trajectory, the individual would experience a “systematic divergence between behavior and emotion.” This would go unnoticed while they were conscious; only in hindsight would they realize that, during that period, they were living like a puppet controlled by someone else.James stared at those words ‘systematic divergence between behavior and emotion’ for a very long time. He remembered the countless times I had stood in front of him, my eyes red, pleading with him to believe me just once. Every single time, a sharp, fleeting pain had stabbed his heart. Yet every time, that pain was quickly overshadowed by another, even more intense feeling of irritation.It felt

続きを読む
無料で面白い小説を探して読んでみましょう
GoodNovel アプリで人気小説に無料で!お好きな本をダウンロードして、いつでもどこでも読みましょう!
アプリで無料で本を読む
コードをスキャンしてアプリで読む
DMCA.com Protection Status