Thought It Was 'The End', Only to Return to a Changed Genre - Chapter 150
“Lucian Cole doesn’t know, Lloyd doesn’t know either. Even they don’t have any answers. You’ve locked everything away in that little head of yours.”
Shane lightly tapped his temple with his long fingers, then forced a slight smile. It would have been better if he’d stayed expressionless.
If this was supposed to be the face he usually showed her when smiling, Shane’s acting skills were truly terrible.
“I did well, didn’t I? Didn’t I seem like someone you could trust?”
“……”
“I waited silently, obeyed like a dog. You seemed to rely on me quite a bit, too.”
It wasn’t just reliance.
The only reason Adeline hadn’t crumbled under the weight of her terrible nightmares was because of Shane.
It was because she had promised him.
She had endured because she wanted to overcome everything and live with him.
“Even so, you still can’t trust me?”
“And what about you?”
“……”
“Do you trust me?”
In the sharp silence, Adeline bit down hard on her lip.
Every moment he had been kind now felt like a ploy to get her to reveal her secrets. She knew it wasn’t true. She didn’t believe the bloodstained sincerity Shane had shown her was fake.
His desperate, love-filled blue eyes had laid bare the feelings she had always tried to hide. The tears he shed as he held her when she was on the brink of death, the trembling in his hands.
None of that could have been a lie.
She knew it was her fault for not earning his trust. It made sense that he couldn’t believe her. She knew that.
But knowing didn’t stop her from being furious at the way he was speaking.
“You haven’t told me anything either, so how am I supposed to trust you?”
He had doubted every word she said anyway.
Even pretending to believe a lie would’ve been better than this.
The emotions she had been suppressing, believing she had to endure them because of her guilt, started bubbling to the surface. She had tried so hard to keep them down, but now they slipped through her fingers like water.
You don’t know how I feel.
You don’t know how I’ve survived.
You don’t know how hard it’s been for me.
I held back because I knew I hurt you. I felt guilty for causing you pain, for breaking you. That’s why I accepted it in silence, even though it wasn’t fair. I endured it.
I just wanted to live, but you don’t understand that. So why am I the only one being blamed? Why am I the only sinner here?
It’s not like I wanted to leave.
This world rejected me.
So why do I always have to feel sorry? That was the best I could do. I was struggling, too.
I tried so hard, just to keep my promise to you.
Unable to hold back any longer, Adeline shouted.
“You don’t trust me either! That’s why you’re always locking me up! So how can I trust you?”
How fragile the trust between them had always been.
No matter how many times they had slept holding each other, kissed each other’s eyes, noses, foreheads, cheeks, jaws, lips, and ears—there had never been trust between them.
Shane calmly watched her before he spoke.
“I don’t trust you. I never have.”
His voice was just as dry.
Tears burst out of her as if something inside her had broken.
Adeline wiped them away with her sleeve, annoyed at the ones pooling on her chin, but they kept streaming down, too many to stop with just a few swipes.
Normally, by now, Shane would have wiped them away with his large hands and stopped her from rubbing too harshly, saying she’d hurt her skin.
But tonight, he just stood there, distant, watching her as if he was a stranger.
“Crying won’t help, Adeline. I won’t comfort you until you tell me what you know.”
“I never—hic—asked you to.”
She hadn’t wanted his comfort. But his clear change in attitude made her feel utterly miserable.
“Did the promise I made to return to you sound like nonsense to you?”
“No. I wanted to believe it wasn’t nonsense.”
Shane let out a low sigh.
“I was terrified you might hate me.”
“……”
“So I stuck close to you, hoping you might like me, even just a little. It made me happy when you smiled at me, when you hugged me in your sleep, when you leaned against me. What else could I do? I clung to you like an idiot, begging for love like a pathetic mongrel.”
When his blue eyes blinked and opened again, a layer of them peeled away, revealing a deep, sharp anger.
“But I forgot. The thing I fear most isn’t that you’ll hate me. It’s that you’ll die.”
He had forgotten that.
Buried in the sweet hope that maybe she could love him.
“Hate me, despise me, whatever you want, Adeline. It doesn’t matter.”
Not compared to the fear of you dying.
T/N: Dang, Adeline’s just as much of a red flag—if not a bigger and worse red flag
