He Punished Me for Erasing Her Ink, by Carving His Rage Into My Flesh Chapter 02

He Punished Me for Erasing Her Ink, by Carving His Rage Into My Flesh Chapter 02

I shoved past the people trying to stop me and ripped the white sheet away.

The middle-aged woman beneath it tared up with sightless, bulging eyes, as if in her final moment she had seen something too horrifying to bear.

I shook my head in frantic denial. “My mom was healthy. She was fine this morning!”

One of the paramedics glanced at me and said, “Your mother took a lethal dose of pesticide.”

No.

No, that was impossible.

My mother loved me more than her own life. I refused to believe she would leave me to fend for myself so easily.

I opened the messaging app on her phone.

A stranger had sent her a link to the livestream.

My knees hit the pavement hard. Pain and hatred surged through my chest, threatening to choke the air from my lungs.

It was me.

I had killed my own mother.

In her notes app, she had left me her last words.

[Claire, don’t stay with a man who doesn’t love you just because of me.]

[My butterfly girl, leave Harbor City. Go find your freedom.]

Beside my mother’s body, I broke down into a primal, gut-wrenching sob.

Ever since I was little, my skin had been as fragile as parchment.

Sometimes it even blistered and wept.

My classmates looked at me with disgust, as if I were some kind of repulsive monster.

Only my mother would hold me and tell me again and again, “You’re not like everyone else. You’re my butterfly girl.”

“If you don’t want to go to school, I’ll teach you at home.”

But I refused to surrender to my fate. I insisted on staying in school.

In middle school, Adrian transferred into my class and ended up sitting beside me in class.

He was the one who chased away the kids who bullied me.

Even if it meant taking the long way home, he walked me back every single day.

Back then, when I looked at him, I thought I saw my future with him.

I thought that besides my mother, there was finally one other person in the world who wanted to protect me.

After college, I secretly took the money my mother had saved for me and invested every cent into Adrian’s startup.

That time, I won my bet against fate.

On the day his company went public and he rang the opening bell, Adrian placed the key to a Rolls-Royce in my hand.

Reporters swarmed around us, microphones shoved in our faces.

“Mr. Blackwell, why spend so much on a car for your girlfriend?”

On camera, he looked elegant and untouchable in his tailored suit, but his smile was soft.

“When I first started my company, she rode behind me on my old scooter,” he said. “Back then, I swore that one day I’d put her in the back seat of a Rolls-Royce.”

“From now on, you should call her Mrs. Blackwell.”

Then he took out a ring and got down on one knee.

With that proposal, Adrian had turned our story into a fairy tale: she stood by him when he had nothing, and he gave her the world when he finally had everything.

Back then, everyone in Harbor City called us the ultimate power couple.

I stayed in the morgue the entire afternoon.

Only when a staff member spoke did I finally snap back to the brutal reality.

“Mrs. Blackwell, this card was declined too.”

The card I had just handed over was the last one I had on me.

The man who had once bought me luxury cars and mansions had now frozen every one of my bank accounts as a final act of cruelty to appease his mistress.

I swallowed the bitterness in my throat.

Then I pulled out every bill I had and begged the staff member, “This is all I have right now. Please arrange my mother’s cremation first. I’ll pay the rest, I swear.”

He only shook his head.

“This isn’t even enough for the deposit.”

He looked at me with thinly veiled mockery. “Why don’t you swallow your pride and ask Mr. Blackwell? This kind of money is nothing to him.”

I closed my eyes and took the gold bracelet off my wrist.

“It’s worth at least a hundred thousand dollars. Please, just take it as collateral.”

Greed flashed across his face as he took it. He even bit down on it to test the gold.

Then, almost immediately, he slammed it onto the desk.

“I called you Mrs. Blackwell out of courtesy, and you dare hand me this copper-plated trash?”