He Locked The AC At Sixteen While I Bled In Pain Chapter 09

He Locked The AC At Sixteen While I Bled In Pain Chapter 09

A few days later, the city was hit by a historic blizzard. The temperature plunged below zero, turning the entire metropolis into an ice sculpture.

At eleven o’clock that night, my home automation system flagged a notification.

“Unrecognized visitor loitering outside the main gate. No valid access permissions detected.”

Holding a cup of hot tea, I walked over to the second-floor French windows and looked down toward the front gates. Out in the driving snow, Ethan was standing dead straight outside the iron bars.

He had intentionally stripped off his heavy cashmere overcoat, wearing nothing but a thin white dress shirt against the storm. Within half an hour, his lips had turned a deep purple, his face was deathly white, and his entire frame shook.

He was resorting to self-harm. He wanted to use this pathetic display of suffering to invoke the memory of that junior year winter, when I had run through three blocks in a blizzard just to buy him fever medicine.

Unfortunately for him, he forgot that the Nadia who loved him with her whole heart had already been frozen to death in his sixty-degree living room.

The phone on my table buzzed with an unknown number. I accepted the call and put it on speaker.

“Nadia…” Ethan’s voice vibrated with a heavy shiver, dripping with desperate supplication. “It’s so cold out here… the wind is brutal… I’m freezing to death…”

I took a slow sip of my tea, my voice completely level. “Mr. Hayes, standing out in the freeze at someone else’s house? Do you have some kind of exhibitionist masochism?”

“No… Nadia, I just want to see you!” Ethan’s voice flared with a sudden, desperate hope. “You answered the phone, that means you still care about me, right? Nadia, let me in, please? Just let me look at you through the glass, I’m begging you…”

He broke down sobbing, his cries mixing with the howling wind outside. “Junior year when I had that high fever, you told me you could never bear to see me shivering… Nadia, I’m really so cold, I can’t feel my hands or feet anymore, please save me…”

I stared through the snow at the man who was rapidly turning into a block of ice. “Is it really that cold?” I asked softly.

“Yes! It’s so cold my bones are aching… Nadia, open the gate for me, please?”

I set my teacup down. “Okay,” I said.

The heavy iron gates of the estate slowly began to pivot open. Ethan was ecstatic. He practically dragged himself forward on his hands and knees, his tears freezing into ice tracks on his face.

“Nadia! I knew you wouldn’t abandon me! I knew…”

But his footsteps slammed to a halt in the snow. The figure emerging from the mansion wasn’t me. It was an automated delivery droid.

Resting on the droid’s mechanical tray was a very familiar synthetic comforter. It was the exact same blanket he had ordered the movers to throw at my feet to protect Anna’s temperature preferences two years ago.

Ethan stared at the cheap fabric, his mind going completely blank. Standing inside the warmth of my living room, I used the outdoor intercom to echo his own words right back to him, syllable for syllable.

“Ethan, didn’t you complain about being cold?” My voice resonated clearly through the blizzard, shattering his final delusion. “If you’re really that cold, just throw on a couple more blankets.”

“Can’t you grow up and stop using this kind of self-harm just to get attention? We’re all adults here. Staging a drama like this only makes things embarrassing for everyone.”

The moment the words finished playing, the iron security gates slammed shut and locked into place.

Ethan’s legs gave out, and he dropped heavily into the knee-deep snow. His eyes wide with disbelief, a low wail tore from his throat.

His frozen hands desperately clutched at the rough, freezing synthetic comforter. The cheap fabric chafed against his numb skin, drawing sharp pain.

Only now, in the absolute zero of a sub-zero storm, did he finally experience a fraction of the suffocating, helpless despair I felt when my body and dignity were trampled on while I writhed in pain.

“No… Nadia! Don’t do this!”