Chapter 4

When I opened my eyes again, I smelled disinfectant.

Caroline sat beside me, looking at me with a strange expression.

For once, she was nice to me. She told me to take care of myself, even bringing me food herself.

The day I returned home from the hospital, I passed by their room and overheard them talking about marrying me off to the town dunce.

"He's dumb, but his family is offering a good sum in exchange for a wife. It's 200 thousand dollars. Let Sophia marry him and have a child with him. Everyone will be happy."

Dazedly, I somehow found my way back to my room.

An urgent thought arose in my mind. I had to escape.

I found an opportunity to grab Caroline's sleeping pills. I crushed them up and added them to the dinner that I had cooked. I even added some to the dog's food bowl.

Late at night, when I heard Andrew's loud snores and Toby's sniffling, I quietly opened the door to the bedroom.

The door creaked loudly. In the past, this would have woken up the dog, who would in turn wake up Andrew and Caroline.

However, this time, the dog did not bark. Andrew's snoring did not falter either.

Holding in my excitement, I crept through the darkness, terrified of making another sound.

I reached the front door without triggering anything.

When I opened the door, the cold night air rushed in.

Caroline stood there, still holding her position with her ears pressed against the door. When she saw me frozen in shock, she laughed. "I saw you eavesdropping on us earlier. Then, I found two of my sleeping pills missing. You're quite clever, aren't you?"

This time, Caroline did not beat me up. She came to an agreement with the town dunce quickly and married me off to him.

On the day of the wedding, I finally saw Xavier.

He stormed into the dunce's house, just like he had done when I was 16.

This time, he did not use violence to solve the problem. He told his assistant to give the dunce's family 300 thousand dollars, then took me away.

I was ecstatic to have escaped from there. I wanted to thank him, but I found myself saying, "Why did you come so late, Xavier? It's been almost a month. I was miserable."

Xavier sat beside me, seemingly focused on replying to his messages on his phone. He looked unusually soft.

I had never seen that expression on him.

I started to feel uneasy and quietly called out his name.

He turned to me. There was a strange disgust and resentment in his eyes that I couldn't comprehend.

Slowly, he put down his phone and smiled coldly at me. "You've been lying to me all this time, Sophia."

I moved away instinctively. "What did I lie to you about?"

He pulled me into his arms roughly and whispered in my ear, "What do you think?"

My ears reddened instantly. We'd never been so intimate before.

"I…"

Before I could finish, he pulled down the collar of my shirt and asked darkly, staring at my shoulder, "What is this?"

They were the bruises I had gotten from being beaten.

Before I could explain, Xavier pushed me away and took out his handkerchief to wipe his hands. "Suzie was right."

There was disgust in his voice. "You really are … shameless."

I didn't know what he was talking about.

Xavier straightened. He was more than six feet tall, so his presence overwhelmed me.

Slowly, he said, "You make me feel sick. You're disgusting."

Tears began to fall at once.

Xavier used to hate the sight of me crying.

He used to say that he only knew how to make people cry, not how to make them stop.

I was the only exception. Every time I cried, he would buy me an expensive present, like a dress or a handbag.

Eventually, I became too embarrassed to cry in front of him.

This time, however, he only scoffed when he saw me crying. "Stop pretending, Sophia. Aren't you tired after putting on such an act for so many years?"