He Locked The AC At Sixteen While I Bled In Pain Chapter 05

He Locked The AC At Sixteen While I Bled In Pain Chapter 05

The next morning at ten o’clock, Ethan sat in his corporate office. The morning executive briefing had just concluded.

He wanted to check the security feeds to see if Nadia, that perpetual thorn in his side, was finally behaving herself today. The monitor flared to life, switching to the living room feed.

Ethan took a sip of his coffee, but the moment his eyes hit the screen, his movements froze completely.

The living room was unnervingly quiet. There was no sign of Nadia walking around.

With a slightly trembling finger, he zoomed in on the image. He recognized the pile instantly—it was the ten comforters he had ordered the movers to dump on the floor.

Resting right at the very peak of those blankets, balanced on top of the expensive jewelry boxes he had gifted her over the years, lay a pair of scissors. The edges of the blades were stained with dark, dried blood.

An unexplainable surge of agitation mixed with a sudden panic shot straight into Ethan’s chest. He slammed his coffee cup down, his fingers flying across the screen as he brought up the hallway feed.

The camera pointed directly at Nadia’s bedroom door. The door was wide open, revealing the room inside.

It was completely bare.

Not only was she gone, but her favorite coffee mug was missing from the desk, the framed photo of the two of them on the nightstand was gone, and even the closets had been cleared of any trace of her presence. It was as if she had never inhabited that room at all.

“Running away again? And you actually left your things behind this time?” Ethan let out a cold scoff. He dialed the number he knew by heart. “Let’s see how many days you can last out there.”

The call initiated.

“We’re sorry, the number you have dialed is no longer in service…”

Ethan violently hurled his phone onto the office couch.

“Mr. Hayes, is everything all right?” his assistant asked, pushing the door open after hearing the crash.

Ethan stared fixedly at the carpet, taking a deep, ragged breath to force down the rising panic in his chest.

“Go freeze all the authorized credit cards under Nadia’s name,” Ethan commanded coldly, adjusting his tie as he sat back into his executive chair.

“Find a legal loophole to freeze her assets while you’re at it. A woman who is used to a comfortable life and just quit her job won’t even have the money to buy a cup of coffee. Let’s see how she survives out there.”

The assistant hesitated. “Sir, isn’t that a bit too extreme? Mrs. Hayes…”

“Shut up. Just do what I told you,” Ethan snapped, cutting him off. “She’s just throwing a tantrum. Give it two weeks. Once she can’t even afford a cheap motel room, she’ll come crawling back to apologize. She’s loved me for five years; she can’t live without me.”

Two weeks later, Ethan’s absolute certainty had dissolved into a suffocating, nightly anxiety. Nadia hadn’t come back, and she hadn’t made a single exploratory phone call.

At eleven o’clock one night, reeking heavily of alcohol, Ethan pushed open the doors to his residence. The security cameras lining the walls still blinked their red lights, but they no longer captured that familiar figure.

“Nadia, pour me a glass of warm water…” he muttered out of habit, loosening his tie as he collapsed onto the couch.

The only response was the faint, low hiss of the AC blowing sixty-degree air into the empty room. Ethan closed his eyes and waited for a long time before jerking awake. Nadia had been gone for half a month.

Under the influence of the alcohol, his stomach began to spasm with intense pain. Covered in cold sweat, he struggled up from the couch and stumbled toward the medicine cabinet.

When he pulled open the drawer, it was stuffed to the brim with Anna’s anti-anxiety prescriptions. He rummaged through the clutter for ages before finally unearthing a box of expired stomach medication from a dark corner.

Staring at the expired box in his hand, Ethan felt a sudden, violent wrenching in his heart.

He remembered their junior year of college. It was also during the dead of winter. He had a raging fever and was rolling around on the bed from stomach cramps.

It was a freezing night, well below zero, and Nadia hadn’t even taken the time to put on a coat. Wearing nothing but her thin pajamas, she had run through three whole blocks in the dark just to buy his medication.

When she returned, her hands were frozen bright red, yet she insisted on tucking his hands into her own clothes, using her own body heat to warm him up. Back then, seeing him in pain had made Nadia’s tears fall like rain.

“Nadia…” he whispered.