He Locked The AC At Sixteen While I Bled In Pain Chapter 08

He Locked The AC At Sixteen While I Bled In Pain Chapter 08

Two years later.

Ethan had spent two whole years searching for me like a lunatic. He burned through every connection and resource he possessed, yet he consistently came up empty-handed.

Meanwhile, I had already quietly returned to the country under a completely fresh identity. Over those two years, I became the founder of an accessible, smart home brand that had gone viral across the internet, rapidly capturing the luxury smart housing market.

My success was no fluke. It was built directly upon the flesh-and-blood agony Ethan had inflicted on me.

That night, because I had cut the live electrical wires with household scissors, the web of my right hand had been deeply mangled. Due to the lack of immediate medical care, the blades cut through the deep motor pathways.

My right hand was entirely ruined. I couldn’t even lift a moderately heavy glass of water without my fingers trembling.

I could no longer navigate the world like an ordinary person; even twisting open a bottle cap became an impossible luxury.

So, I gathered a top-tier engineering team and spent day and night developing a smart home operating system designed specifically for individuals with physical limitations. It completely eliminated complicated fingerprint and facial recognition barriers, doing away with administrative gatekeeping entirely.

Instead, it relied on precise thermal and motion tracking to automatically stabilize indoor temperatures at a perfectly comfortable seventy-eight degrees. I took the abyss I had been plunged into and turned it into a light to guide others.

Inside the VIP green room at the industry convention, I had just finished delivering a highly anticipated keynote presentation. I sat on the couch, attempting to twist open a standard plastic water bottle.

But those severed nerves refused to cooperate. My right fingers trembled, and the bottle slipped, clattering to the floor.

At that exact moment, the door to the green room was flung open.

“Nadia!”

Ethan stood at the threshold. His bespoke suit was wrinkled and unkempt, and his eyes were heavily bloodshot. He had initially intended to run in and drop to his knees to beg for my forgiveness, but his gaze locked instantly onto my trembling right hand and the water bottle rolling across the floor.

Ethan’s heart was instantly torn to shreds. He dropped to the floor, scrambling desperately to snatch up the bottle at my feet.

“Nadia, I’m so sorry… Let me open it for you!” he wept, his face drenched in tears as his trembling hands reached out, trying to cradle my ruined right hand.

Right before his skin could touch mine, the smart security system mounted on the wall flared with a bright red warning light.

“Warning. Visitor emotional distress and abnormal heart rate detected,” the machine synthesized. “Visitor clearance revoked. Immediate removal initiated.”

Ethan’s movements froze instantly. Hearing the word ‘visitor,’ his face turned entirely pale.

I didn’t even look at him. I calmly pressed a button on the armrest. A mechanical arm extended smoothly from the adjacent console, took the bottle from Ethan’s paralyzed grip, twisted the cap open effortlessly, and placed it securely into my left hand.

I took a sip of the water and looked down at Ethan kneeling on the floor, a mocking smile touching the corner of my lips.

“Do you see this, Ethan?” I said. “You destroyed my hand, so I built a world that will take care of me forever. And in this world, you don’t even have the clearance to be a visitor.”

Security personnel burst into the room, grabbing Ethan and dragging him out of the convention center like a stray dog. Yet, even after being dumped outside, he didn’t leave.

Like a madman, he stood vigil outside my green room door for an entire day and night. No matter how many times security tried to move him, he refused to budge.

He dialed my number hundreds of times, sending countless desperate text messages.

[Nadia, please answer just once,] one read. [I will transfer every single share of Hayes Enterprises to you, all of it!]

[I’ll give you my life, just let me look at your hand…]

I sat inside the room, watching the alerts pop up on my screen, and casually moved his number into the blocklist. He hadn’t cared about that hand when it was bleeding; I certainly didn’t need his pity now.