Twenty years ago, on a rainy night, I stood in front of her with my frail body, clutching a rusted iron pipe, trembling all over but shouting the harshest words I’d ever said: "If you dare touch her again, I’ll kill you!" No one knew that night—I wasn’t a hero. I was just a fool strangled by fate, who personally shoved the one who saved me into hell. Today, I stopped her in the hospital corridor. The white coat made her look cold as frost, her badge reading “Dr. Aurora Lin.” How laughable—she even changed her surname, escaping completely. But when I stepped closer, her fingers trembled, and the medicine bottle dropped to the floor. She’s still afraid of me. “Your mother is dying,” I said, my voice like sandpaper scraping over wounds. “The man who held a knife to her throat back then—was your father. But the one who signed the organ donation consent form in the end? My mother.” She snapped her head up, her eyes exploding with stormy waves. Memories rewound— She knelt in a pool of blood, wailing as she held her mother’s body, while I sat in the police station giving testimony, praised as a “brave good boy.” No one told me the “attacker” I knocked unconscious that night was the father she had tried desperately to protect. No one mentioned that my mother, to clear me of guilt, quietly took the blame—and died three years later from liver failure. Aurora lost everything—her name, her identity, her life. And I? I wore the mask of a hero and lived as the greatest demon. “You have no idea how these twenty years have been for me,” she suddenly laughed, tears crashing down. “Every day, I wish it had been you who died instead.” I pulled out a knife from my chest—a stainless steel scalpel, stolen last night from her office. “Here,” I turned it around and offered her the handle. “Now you’re the doctor. Now you’re the winner. Whatever you want to take from me, I’ll accept.” She didn’t take it. Instead, she lunged forward and hugged me, her nails digging into my back as if trying to carve me into her bones. “Rory… kill me,” she whispered against my ear, laughing through sobs. “We should’ve both died that rainy night anyway.” The heart monitor shrieked sharply. Inside the room, her mother’s heartbeat flattened into a straight line. And we stood at the edge between life and death—neither willing to let go.

The moment the red nightgown touched her skin, the marriage crossed a line it could never return from. The private villa was silent except for the soft hum of hidden cameras, their lenses locked on the bed where she lay with one hand over her pregnant belly. Upstairs, beyond a concealed bookshelf, the feed streamed into a surveillance room where he watched without blinking. At 3:17 a.m., ash fell from his cigarette as he ordered the recording to continue—every breath, every movement archived like evidence awaiting trial. At dawn, the house transformed into a different stage. Sunlight flooded the bedroom as he returned in a tailored suit, immaculate and unreadable. She approached with warm milk and a careful smile, playing the role she had survived in for three years. He didn’t touch the cup. He pulled the curtains wide and asked a single question that split the room in two: she had never been blind, had she? Glass shattered, blood traced her ankle, and the first mask cracked—but he didn’t accuse. He placed a photograph on the table instead, time-stamped proof of her seeing eyes, her reflection sharp and conscious. The room tightened. She pleaded survival. He answered with proximity. A gun rose, slow and steady, as contracts and recordings surfaced on the screens—prenatal records altered, medical signatures forged, a lineage he believed betrayed. The risk escalated again: not a lie exposed, but a future contested. He pressed closer. She shielded her belly and swore the child was his. He didn’t believe words; he believed systems. Then the systems betrayed him. From the corner, the fetal monitor cut through the silence—beep… beep…—a heartbeat impossible to fake. The weapon hovered, half-pressed. Outside, wind lifted the curtains like witnesses leaning in. Love collapsed into ash; hatred found no landing. He stood frozen between proof and pulse, between a kill shot and a living record that would outlast any confession. He lowered nothing. Said nothing. Somewhere beneath the floorboards, another file began uploading—unplayed, unfinished. And as the heartbeat continued, so did the countdown, toward a decision no contract could contain and a reckoning that hadn’t even started yet.