Pain Is a Family Matter Chapter 04
My body suddenly felt light, as if someone had ripped a massive wad of cotton from my chest. The pressure and pain vanished. I felt clean, almost unreal.
My brothers clustered together a short distance away. I could not tell who had died. I saw only a mangled shape at the center of them, flesh torn apart, blood pouring down in thick streams around his feet.
I walked toward them.
Amber stood outside the circle. She looked like a wooden doll pinned in place, her face drained of color.
“That’s impossible,” she whispered. “How could this happen…’
When she saw me standing upright and completely unhurt, she screamed, “Viola, how are you fine?”
Her voice cracked. “The one injured should’ve been you. Why is it Rayden?”
She lunged forward and grabbed my collar, her fingers shaking. “What did you do? What did you use to kill him?”
“So you admit you meant to get hurt,” I said calmly.
She froze. Her eyes darted away. She gave no answer.
The others finally noticed the commotion.
Justin walked over with his lips pressed thin. His gaze swept over me from head to toe, sharp and cold, as if he were dissecting an object.
After a moment, he spoke with certainty. “She doesn’t have that ability. She’s timid. Everything she does is under our watch. The Ritualist said anyone capable of that kind of ritual is extremely rare. She couldn’t pull it off.”
He looked away, already finished with me. “The spell must have degraded over time. Either way, we need to find that Ritualist first.”
Rayden was not dead yet. They rushed him to the hospital. After multiple surgeries, he survived.
I was genuinely surprised. ‘So a substitute death does not guarantee death.’
The Shared-Sense System paused before answering.
[Normal pain is distributed among bound targets. The substitute-death effect triggers when the host reaches a near-death state. Near-death does not equal confirmed death.]
Rayden lived, but the doctor said he would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. For a man who lived for speed and freedom, a professional racer who measured life in lap times, that sentence was worse than a death notice.
When I lost the use of my leg and could never dance again, he called me weak. He said I could not handle setbacks and said my crying was disgusting.
Now it was his turn. He fell apart faster than I ever had.
Furniture lay smashed. Vases shattered across the floor. Service staff quit in waves after he beat them or screamed them out of the house.
Even Amber, who cooked for him herself and tried to please him, escaped nothing. He hurled a bowl at her and sent her stumbling backward.
1/2
Chapter 4
+25 BONUS
“It’s your fault!” he roared. “All of it is your fault! If you hadn’t insisted on that stupid rope-free jump, I wouldn’t have ended up like this! You ruined me!”
Amber had been treated like a princess her entire life. She had never endured this kind of abuse. She burst into tears and clutched the broken bowl.
I passed by the doorway, dragging my crippled leg behind me.
I stopped and laughed. “Rayden, my cousin is free and blazing, conquering everything. What’s wrong with that?”
I tilted my head. “Not everyone is a useless coward like you.”
His eyes reddened.
“Viola, you cripple, you dare laugh at me?” he shouted. “If you weren’t so useless, how would this injury have transferred to me?”
He went on, his breathing ragged, “It doesn’t matter. Justin already went to find the Ritualist. He’s powerful. He’ll definitely have a solution.”
I shrugged, made a show of indifference, and limped past his door.
Even so, my chest tightened. That Ritualist truly was capable. He had kept me absorbing Amber’s misfortunes and calamities for over 10 years.
If he could do that, could he also interfere with the Shared-Sense System? And if he could, what would happen to me then?
