Chapter 2

Nodding back at Alice, I pulled my arm away and said with an impassive expression, "Got it."

As I turned to head back to the bedroom, I caught a flash of relief in her eyes. The anger in my heart intensified.

The moment I entered the room, I saw a friend request from someone with a familiar profile picture. She'd also sent a short message. "Submitting my application to be your bride."

Without warning, my heart missed a beat.

It was her—Vanessa Langdon.

We'd broken up due to a misunderstanding some years ago, and we hadn't had any contact since.

I hadn't expected her to enter my life once more in this manner. I stared at the request, my fingertip hovering over the option to accept it, but I couldn't click on it.

Was this just a coincidence or…

I tossed and turned in bed, unable to fall asleep. My chest felt all clogged up, so I decided to get out of bed for a glass of water.

The living room was completely dark. Only a faint bluish glow seeped through the crack of the door to the study. After a pause, as if possessed, I snuck over to the study.

Alice was sitting at the desk, the light from her laptop screen illuminating her flushed face.

Playing on the screen was that video of the "assault" she'd endured, the one that had caused me great agony. As she watched the video, she kept mumbling Cole's name while digging her fingers deep into her body.

"Cole… Cole… You feel so good…"

It felt as though something inside of me snapped. My heart turned to ice.

With trembling fingers, I ended up accepting Vanessa's friend request.

I slept poorly that night. All kinds of scenes kept flashing through my mind, like some sort of movie.

When I woke the next morning, the sunlight outside the window was bright and warm, but I had a splitting headache.

After emerging from my room, I saw two people in the dining room.

Cole sat at the table, his body almost touching Alice's. The two seemed to be carrying on a conversation with such intimate expressions that it looked as if they were alone in the entire world.

In the past, he had always dropped by the house to accompany Alice, claiming to be her "best male friend".

I'd long felt that the closeness they exhibited crossed the line, but out of consideration for Alice's so-called trauma, I just put up with the discomfort I felt.

However, it was now painfully obvious that I wasn't just reading too much into it.

"You're up, Luke," Cole called out after he spotted me.

He picked up a bowl of beef stew and handed it to me with a grin. "Alice tells me you like stews. Here. Try the beef stew I made. Alice loves it."

"That won't be necessary," I declined with a frosty expression. "I'm allergic to beef."

Cole's smile stiffened, and he swiftly put on a look of feigned hurt. "Are you looking down on me, Luke? Or are you just looking down on my cooking?"

Before I could say anything, Alice's expression darkened as well. She grabbed the bowl of piping hot beef stew and flung it all over me. "What's the meaning of this, Luke? It's one thing for you to turn your nose up at me, but are you even turning your nose up at my friends, too?"

The boiling soup soaked through my shirt, scalding my skin. As I gasped from the pain, I had the instinctive urge to try to appease Alice. As it was, in the past, I would always give in whenever she threw a tantrum.

But this time, out of the corner of my eye, I caught the way she'd smirked in smug delight for the briefest moment. It was like a bucket of cold water that put out the spark of concern that had ignited in me.

I was able to stop myself before I said anything.

There was no way Alice didn't know about my beef allergy. But lately, she constantly used the most trivial of things to force me into submission. She would only be satisfied when I humbled myself to apologize and beg for her forgiveness.

Well, I no longer wanted to be the fool who catered to her every whim anymore. The sight of her now inspired nothing but repulsion in me. "If that's how you want to see it, there's nothing I can do about it."

Alice, who looked all fired up, now froze as if her brain had short-circuited. She didn't seem to have expected me to react like that this time.

Upon seeing this, Cole started berating me, "How can you treat Alice like that, Luke? You're being too cold toward her. She's in a fragile state right now. Why can't you just show her more patience and indulgence?"

I turned to Cole and eyed him with undisguised mockery. "If you care so much about her, Cole, why don't you take care of her yourself? Why bother putting on a show here instead?"