He Turned My Love Into a Grave Chapter 18

He Turned My Love Into a Grave Chapter 18

She was hurled sideways, crashing hard against a billboard. Her head spun, stars bursting across her vision.

A commotion erupted. She staggered to her feet, blood streaming from a gash on her forehead. “Silas?”

No answer.

She swayed, pressing a hand to the wound, and scanned the chaos around her. Nothing. He was nowhere.

“Call 911! Someone call 911!”

The screams cut through her fog. She stumbled forward and pushed through the crowd. One look, and her blood reversed direction in her veins. Her chest seized.

Silas lay in a pool of blood, gasping like a fish stranded on dry land.

“Silas. Silas!”

She forgot the pain. Forgot the blood running down her own face. She dropped to her knees and grabbed his arm. “Where are you hurt? Silas!”

She’d long since stopped loving him. But after years together, he still held a piece of her. Watching him bleed out in front of her—terror and despair swallowed her whole.

“Elara. You okay?”

He lay in her arms, feeling no pain. Just a strange warmth spreading through his body. Her face was the only clear thing in a world gone blurry. He wanted to reach up and wipe away her tears. But his arm felt like it didn’t exist anymore.

Then a figure stumbled out of a dented van in the distance.

The remaining color drained from Elara’s face. Her scream was raw, gutted. “Lila! What have you done?”

The woman clutched her head, sobbing at the sight in front of her. “It wasn’t me. It wasn’t supposed to be me. I only wanted to hurt you. So you couldn’t take my child away. It was you—you did this. You’re the reason Silas is dying, Elara.”

She turned to run.

The crowd erupted. “She’s trying to flee! Someone call the cops!”

A few men took off after her. Sirens wailed in the distance. Paramedics swarmed.

Silas was lifted onto a stretcher. Elara, trembling, was helped into the ambulance. After they stitched up her forehead, she walked into the restroom in a daze, desperate to scrub the blood off her hands. The bright red clung to her skin. She couldn’t tell whose it was anymore—hers or his.

“Why won’t it come off?”

She slumped over the sink and sobbed.

She didn’t even understand why she was crying. Silas had been cruel. Heartless. He’d betrayed the most honest, vulnerable part of her. Yet the moment he went down, she’d panicked. The terror had wrapped around her throat and choked the air from her lungs.

The surgical light went dark.

She walked toward the doctor and watched him shake his head, helpless.

The world warped. Everything stretched away from her, distant and unreal. And then Silas was there, crouching in front of her, his voice gentle. “You’re my fiancée. I should spoil you.”

“Elara, when I claim someone, I don’t let go.”

The words grew fainter, the image sharper.

Rain fell in thin, gray streaks. She stood beneath an umbrella in a quiet Memorial Cemetery, staring at a headstone.

Silas’s face smiled back at her—distorted, uncanny. He rarely smiled. But on their wedding day, he’d never stopped. His lips had curved all day, his eyes soft.

In the photo, you could almost see it. His gaze was tilted to the right. Toward the woman on his arm. Elara.

A week later, Lila was sentenced to twenty-five years for felony hit-and-run. A steel door slammed shut on her proud, poisonous life forever.

Elara sat in the Voss family estate, holding Silas’s final proposal gift. He’d transferred ninety percent of his shares to her. He’d signed a Prenuptial Agreement with a single binding clause: one act of betrayal, and a lifetime of atonement.

A member of the Voss family held up the child—the boy who looked exactly like Silas. “Will you take him with you?”

Elara touched the baby’s soft cheek, her gaze tender. But her voice was ice. “He looks just like him. Too bad I stopped loving Silas a long time ago.”

“The Voss family can afford to raise one child, can’t you?”

She turned and walked away, down a road where Silas no longer existed.