I Drank Silverwolf’s Bane for His Sake, but He Thought It Was an Act Chapter 09
That night, Ethan used every private connection he had to bury the news.
Noah’s men shoved Sophia into a van and hauled her back to the abandoned training camp.
I followed them all the way back to the underground safe house.
Everything was just as it had been when I died.
The blood on the floor had turned black. The walls were streaked where my fingers had clawed.
They threw Sophia inside.
The door slammed shut and locked.
She threw herself against the iron and beat it with both hands.
“Ethan! Let me out! I don’t want to be in here!”
Outside the door, Ethan sat on an old wooden chair with a glass of ice water in his hand.
He watched Sophia on the surveillance monitor. His voice was empty.
“Turn on the speakers,” he told Noah.
Ethan’s grim voice came through the intercom.
“Sophia. Olivia spent ten days in there. She starved for eight of them.”
“So I’m locking you in for ten days too.”
“No food. No water.”
Sophia screamed inside.
“No! Ethan, this is illegal confinement! You’ve lost your mind! I’ll go to the authorities!”
Ethan let out a soft laugh.
“The authorities? When my men loaded you into the van, I posted a statement from your
communicator.”
“Sophia is undergoing a ten-day closed, offline immersion training to prepare for her new role.
Nobody is coming for you.”
Sophia collapsed to the floor, sobbing.
Ethan wasn’t done.
He pointed at the ventilation duct.
“Drop it in.”
Noah hesitated, then took out a small glass vial and dropped it through the duct.
The vial shattered against the concrete inside.
A sharp chemical smell spread through the sealed room.
Sophia clamped a hand over her mouth and nose, coughing violently.
“Ethan – what did you put in here? I can’t breathe…”
Ethan sat in front of the monitor, his gaze sharp as a blade.
“A concentrated irritant gas. It won’t kill you right away. But it’ll slowly burn through your
airways.”
“You can find out for yourself what it felt like, watching Olivia roll across the floor as she
suffocated.”
For the first three days, Sophia screamed and cursed inside, smashing anything within reach.
By the third night, hunger had left her too weak to stand.
She crawled along the floor, licking up the biscuit crumbs I had once dropped into the cracks.
Like a dog.
By the fifth day, Sophia was severely dehydrated, slipping in and out of consciousness.
She hallucinated, spinning in circles, clawing at the walls.
“Olivia… Olivia, don’t come near me! I didn’t mean to hurt you. It was Ethan. Ethan wouldn’t let me
save you!”
Outside the screen, Ethan crushed the glass in his hand.
Shards bit into his palm, blood pouring down, but he didn’t seem to feel it.
Yes.
In the end-if Ethan hadn’t indulged her, if he hadn’t wanted to make his mistress smile – how
would I have died?
Ethan looked at Sophia on the screen and suddenly covered his face.
His shoulders shook.
He understood, finally, what pain felt like when it landed on him.
Ethan sent people to sort through my belongings.
At the lake estate downtown, the things that belonged to me were heartbreakingly few.
A few washed-out clothes.
A handful of cookbooks.
And a drawer full of antidepressants.
When Ethan pulled the drawer open, he froze.
He picked up a bottle and checked the date.
Three years ago.
The second year of our marriage.
Sophia had just come back from overseas then.
To welcome her home, Ethan had walked out of my birthday dinner and driven two hundred kilometers through the rain to pick her up at the airport.
That night, the storm had been terrible.
I sat alone in the empty lake estate. I finished an entire cold cake. I went through half a bottle of sedatives.
The housekeeper found me and got me to the hospital. They pumped my stomach in time.
What had Ethan said then?
He’d stood beside my hospital bed and looked at me coldly.
“Olivia, your little ploys for attention are getting cheaper by the year. Other than scaring people, with the idea of dying, what else do you know how to do?”
After that, I never asked him for anything again.
I got by, fistful by fistful, on antidepressants.
Noah found a small wooden box at the very back of the walk-in closet.
There was no jewelry inside.
Only a thick stack of diaries, and a letter sealed in a clear plastic bag.
On the envelope, four words:
For Ethan’s Eyes Only.
Ethan took the letter with shaking hands.
He carefully tore open the plastic and pulled out the paper.
My handwriting was delicate, but the last few lines had clearly grown unsteady.
Ethan, by the time you read this, I’ll be gone.
Don’t blame yourself. I knew the so-called blood moon hunt was fake.
At those words, tears fell onto the paper, one by one.
That day, I overheard you talking to the tactical instructor on the phone in the study.
You said you wanted to watch me beg you to save me, in despair. You wanted me to feel what Sophia felt, neglected in some border Pack.
I could have called you out.
But I was too tired.
For seven years, I followed you like a dog left out in the rain by its owner, begging you to look at me just one more time.
I was so tired.
When I saw the bottle of wolfsbane, I actually felt a kind of relief.
I knew what it was. I knew that once I drank it, there would be no coming back.
But it was the only way I could be free.
The thing I regret most in this life is sharing my umbrella with you in that rainy alley when I was
nineteen.
If I could do it over, I would have walked the other way.
Goodbye. I hope, in life or in death, we never meet again.
After Ethan read the last word, he pressed the letter against his chest and curled up on the floor.
“I won’t allow it, Olivia. I won’t allow you to never see me again.”
He rolled on the floor and slammed his head into the hardwood.
Again. And again.
His forehead split, and blood ran down his face, blurring his eyes.
“You knew it was fake. Why did you still drink it? You should have hit me. Cursed me. Why did you punish yourself?”
His voice was ragged and wild.
Noah tried to pull him up. Ethan kicked him away.
“Get out. All of you, get out!”
Ethan stumbled into the kitchen and pulled a boning knife from the block.
He stared at a smiling photograph of me. Then he raised the blade and drove it into his thigh.
Blood spattered across the floor.
He laughed through his tears.
“It hurts, Olivia. It really hurts. Did it hurt this much for you?”
He pulled the knife out and stabbed his own arm.
I floated above and watched him fall apart, my face cold.
This little hurt was nothing.
The pain of wolfsbane eating through the organs from within was ten thousand times worse.
