He Locked The AC At Sixteen While I Bled In Pain Chapter 11

He Locked The AC At Sixteen While I Bled In Pain Chapter 11

That was the absolute last time I ever saw Ethan.

After my total abandonment that afternoon, the final pillars of his mental stability snapped completely. He went back to that massive, empty estate and never stepped outside again.

Because of his prolonged psychological absence, Hayes Enterprises was left entirely rudderless. Several major capital acquisitions suffered fatal, catastrophic oversights, causing the company’s liquidity to dry up completely.

Within a short six months, the once-unstoppable empire declared total bankruptcy and went into liquidation.

Ethan was saddled with millions in structural debt that he couldn’t hope to repay in several lifetimes. Every piece of real estate and luxury vehicle under his name was seized and auctioned off by the courts.

The man who had once occupied the highest echelons of society had finally slid straight from the clouds into the absolute dirt.

Five years later.

It was yet another freezing New Year’s Eve, a night meant for families to gather under warm lights. The city was buried under a massive blizzard, and the temperature hit rock bottom.

The thoroughly bankrupt, destitute Ethan was now renting a damp, dark basement apartment in a rundown section of the old downtown district.

The secondhand heating unit he had picked up from a flea market had completely broken down on this exact night. The vent blades were jammed open, constantly blasting a stream of freezing, unheated air straight into the small room.

Ethan’s hair had turned entirely white, his face so gaunt and weathered he looked like a man in his sixties. He gave off the sour, pungent odor of someone who hadn’t taken a proper shower in months.

Wearing nothing but a thin, tattered shirt, his right hand tightly gripped the pair of household scissors that had long since rusted over. He was trying to cut the power cord to the malfunctioning heater.

But his fingers were so frozen he had no sensory feedback, and he couldn’t summon an ounce of leverage to squeeze the blades shut.

The freezing air continued to howl through the basement. Ethan finally stopped struggling.

He retreated into the dark corner of the room, wrapping himself tightly inside the very same cheap synthetic comforter he had bought all those years ago. He curled into the coldest recess of the concrete floor, his entire body shuddering.

The extreme cold and hunger began to induce auditory and visual hallucinations. He stared blankly at the stained concrete wall.

In his mind’s eye, he was looking at that junior year of college again. He saw the girl with the flushed, red eyes holding his hand, gently blowing on his small cut.

“Nadia…” Ethan whispered, his cracked, bleeding lips trembling as tears cut clean paths through the grime on his face.

Like a madman losing his grip on reality, he kept speaking into the empty air, reaching out with a desperate, tragic futility.

“Nadia, I’m not hot anymore…”

“I turned the heat up… I set it to seventy-eight degrees, just the way you like it…”

“I bought the Ibuprofen, it’s right here on the table… please just take one…”

“Please come back… my hand hurts so badly, I’m so incredibly cold…”

The only answer he received was the low, rhythmic hum of the broken unit, blowing its freezing draft directly over his shivering frame.

In that self-made tomb, he would spend the rest of his existence reliving the exact day I cast him out, over and over, until his final breath.