After Rebirth, I Refused to Marry the Major, and He Panicked Chapter 08

After Rebirth, I Refused to Marry the Major, and He Panicked Chapter 08

I looked at him and accepted.

The hospital staff told me later that after we left, Colt wandered the halls, muttering to himself.

“It’s all Reid’s conspiracy… he stole my wife… he should have died, not me…”

Reid had told him, before we left, “You’re getting exactly what you deserve.”

“I’m not like you. You had everything and threw it away. What I have, I’ll protect forever.”

After that, Colt was thrown out of the base medical center.

Penelope was tossed out with him.

But the moment she stepped off base, masked men forced poison down her throat.

“Genius healer, huh? You dare to con our family? This is your reward.”

Within minutes, Penelope was raving, limbs twitching uncontrollably. The drug had shattered her mind.

Colt’s mind wasn’t broken. He finally understood.

The woman he’d trusted with his life was a fraud.

He watched Penelope bite off her own tongue and bleed out at his feet.

He stepped over her body, still mumbling, “I’m sorry… Elena… I’m sorry…”

He walked south.

When people asked who he was, he’d answer, “I’m the Sterling heir. Grandfather’s favorite.”

They thought he was crazy. When they asked where he was going, he’d gaze southward and say, “To atone.”

Eventually, he disappeared. People forgot the strange vagrant.

Two weeks later, I sat with Reid in the garden, sharing a pot of tea.

I asked him: had he known, all along, that the girl from the pine grove was me?

Reid plucked a dogwood petal from my shoulder and smiled.

“Yes and no.”

“When my mother went to the Vances to propose, I didn’t know.”

“I told her, if I had to marry a woman I didn’t love, I’d rather die.”

“But the day you walked into the Sterling house, I saw your back. And I recognized you.”

I sipped my tea Light and sweet.

He continued, “Back then, my father heard about me getting bullied and grounded me He hired tutors to teach me at home. I couldn’t go find you.”

“After two weeks, I was finally free. I waited at the corner of your street for days. Never saw you again

My heart softened.

I’d been bedridden with a fever that summer. No doctor could break it.

In my delirium, I dreamed of a man in red robes.

He said, “The cure lies where the iron horse rests.”

When I woke, the fever was gone.

I asked a chaplain to interpret it.

He said, “Your destiny lies with the Sterlings.”

That was why, in my past life, when General Sterling came to propose for Colt, I said yes without hesitation.

But everything had gone wrong.

I looked at Reid, my eyes warm.

“At least this time, I didn’t miss.”

Months later, a forest ranger brought us a scrap of military fabric, found deep in Blackwater Swamp. It bore

the Sterling insignia.

I paid him and stared at the cloth.

Reid wrapped his arms around me from behind. “Still thinking about him?”

I realized then-it was Colt’s. He’d dragged his broken body all the way to that swamp in the end.

I felt no satisfaction. Only emptiness.

I was about to throw it away when I noticed faint words scrawled in dried blood on the lining.

Two words, barely legible: [I’m sorry.]

But I couldn’t forgive.

If there’s a next life, I hope we never meet again.

(The End)