Chapter 2 A Decade of Hatred

Sylvia even promised to give me the wedding of my dreams. For a while, we really were happy.

Then, on the eve of our wedding, everything changed.

Gideon could not stand seeing Sylvia and me together.

He left her a long message. In it, he accused me of paying people to threaten him into leaving.

He claimed he had only walked away because he was afraid and did not want Sylvia to turn against her family for his sake.

After sending the message, Gideon disappeared without a trace.

When Sylvia discovered that my supposed organ donation had been fabricated, she believed every word he had written.

She hated me for deceiving her. She blamed me for "forcing" the man she loved to leave.

So, on our wedding day, she invited the classmates who had bullied me.

"You loved picking on people so much," she said. "Now it's your turn to find out what it feels like."

They beat me mercilessly. They burned my arms with a curling iron. They forced dirty mop water down my throat. They stripped away every shred of my dignity.

That day, I had wanted to tell Sylvia the truth.

But at Claire's hospital bedside, she gripped my hand tightly and warned me that if I refused to keep the secret, she would expose my mother's past to the public.

I had no choice but to give in.

Claire promised me nothing like that would ever happen again.

Later, Sylvia apologized. She admitted she had been wrong and carefully applied medicine to my wounds.

But what she put on my injuries was poison. It only made them worse. She did it just to toy with me.

For the past ten years, she had never stopped tormenting me.

Claire did not understand.

It was not that I refused to give Sylvia another chance. Sylvia had never allowed me to stand beside her in the first place.

With a bitter smile, I rolled up my pant leg. An ugly scar stretched across my calf.

Three years earlier, Sylvia had ordered her friends to hit me with their car.

Because I did not receive medical treatment in time, I still walked with a limp.

"I've repaid every debt I owed," I said quietly. "Now that my mother's gone, you don't need to hold anything against her anymore.

"The man Sylvia loves has come back. She doesn't need me anymore, either. Please… let me go."

Claire closed her eyes.

Unable to bear it any longer, she finally nodded. "I'll arrange the divorce. It'll take a little time. Until then, I hope you'll help me put on one last act."

After I spent ten hours locked inside a walk-in freezer and then lost my mother, my body finally gave out.

Once I finished handling her funeral, I came down with a serious illness.

That was when Sylvia returned with Gideon.

She stormed into my room and yanked me out of bed. "It's already noon and you're still sleeping. Get up and cook for Gideon. He's been craving your mushroom soup."

Dragging my exhausted body into the kitchen, I moved almost on instinct.

My head was pounding, and I could barely think. Even so, my hands kept working.

Before I knew it, the soup was finished and sitting on the table.

Gideon was laughing with Sylvia.

He took one sip. Then he immediately set the bowl down and looked at me with wounded eyes.

"Julian, yes, I came up with the idea to humiliate you with those five dollars. But Sylvia was the one who carried it out. She's also the one who locked you in that freezer for ten hours. If you're angry, be angry at her. Why make the soup so salty just to get back at me?"

Sylvia flew into a rage. Not at Gideon, but at me.

"Julian, if you had not forced Gideon to leave just so you could marry into the Rivers family, we'd have been married years ago and living happily ever after. You ruined everything between us, and now you still have the nerve to target him?

"I'd say these past ten years haven't taught you a thing. It's time you learned another lesson."