Loved Me, Then Destroyed Me

My wife, Janice Frost, was an interworld traveler. People like her weren't supposed to form attachments with anyone in another world.

But she fell for me the moment she saw me. Every time her feelings stirred, it tore through her, like her soul was being ripped apart.

She had endured that pain 99 times.

Later, I was abducted and taken to North Kaman. They beat me every day, over and over.

Right when I was about to break, I remembered the method Janice once taught me, a way to reach her across worlds.

Somehow, I managed to use it.

But instead of her voice alone, I heard her speaking with her mentor from the other side.

"Janice, how could you contact a resistance group yourself and have them take Samuel? I thought you loved him."

Janice's voice was cold and hard.

"This ordeal was meant for Tim. I had to do this to save him. Samuel is the main protagonist of this world. He's protected by fate. Nothing will happen to him. Once this mission is done, I can stay in this timeline for good. When that happens, I'll make it up to him."

My chest tightened until it felt like it might split open.

When those people closed in on me again, I stopped resisting completely.

"Heh. This guy's tougher than he looks."

A woman's voice rang out, edged with mockery. Then, a sharp pain tore through my left leg. The agony hit so hard that I couldn't hold it back anymore. A low groan slipped out.

"Oh? Finally making a sound?"

Another woman spoke up, her voice tinged with amusement.

I forced my eyes open.

The woman in front of me wore heavy makeup, her face lit with a twisted kind of excitement. She held a red-hot iron rod, waving it lazily in front of me before driving it straight into my chest.

"Argh!" I screamed.

It felt like my chest was burning through from the inside out, the heat spreading along every nerve.

"That's better. It isn't fun if you don't scream."

She smiled, satisfied, then pressed the rod into the other side of my chest.

I clenched my teeth, fighting to stay silent. I knew the more I reacted, the more they enjoyed it.

So I endured it, quietly, praying it would end soon.

My tendons had already been severed. I lay there like a torn rag, completely at their mercy.

"Which one is this? Have we used eight methods yet?"

My wife, Janice Frost's, voice came through, clear and distant, just like always.

"Seventh," her mentor replied, a trace of hesitation in his tone. "Do you really need to recreate everything this precisely? You know it was Samuel who saved you back then. Why are you insisting on repaying Tim instead?"

My lashes trembled.

During a landslide years ago, I was the one who dug her out of the rubble with my bare hands, carried her to safety, and collapsed from exhaustion.

When I woke up, she insisted Tim Jenkins had saved her.

No matter how I tried to explain, she never believed me.

So it wasn't that she didn't believe me; she just chose not to.

"Marrying Samuel already betrayed Tim's feelings. I don't want him to go through something like this, too. A man's life is ruined if he goes through this."

Janice let out a quiet sigh, her voice heavy with guilt and helplessness.

Lying on that filthy wooden board, I started laughing. Tears slipped down the sides of my face.

She knew exactly what this would do to a man, and she still chose to do this to me. She kept saying she loved me, yet she pushed me into hell with her own hands.

Didn't that count as betraying me?

A sharp pain twisted through my abdomen. I gasped for air, but blood kept spilling from my mouth.

The man, across from me, panicked.

"What's wrong with him? He's not about to die, is he?"