She held him like a long-lost treasure and said, “I promised you, I won’t let anything happen to you again,” words that struck me with painful familiarity.
The head of the bodyguards who was holding me recognized me and stammered, “President, this is…”
Veronica finally turned to look at me, but her eyes treated me like an enemy.
Her slap sent my face to the side, and the metallic taste of blood filled my mouth; I didn’t cry, though the urge to laugh nearly broke free.
“Do I care who he is?” Veronica’s voice was cold. “If anyone hurts Veronica, even if he’s the son of the richest man, I will make him pay. Teach him a lesson. Let him know what happens when you kidnap Veronica.”
The bodyguard captain opened his mouth, but Veronica’s glare shut him up. They dragged me into an empty room, and fists and boots came down on me without mercy.
My body ached, but my mind wandered, so this was how harsh the blows had felt when Veronica once took them for me.
The metallic taste of blood filled my mouth and nose, yet fear of death never came, because my life had always been given by Veronica, and now it felt as if it were simply being returned.
I didn’t know how much time had passed before the door opened. Enzo leaned into Veronica’s arms and said, “He’s been taught his lesson, just send him away. Make sure I never see him again in this life.”
Veronica did not hesitate. “Alright.”
She personally escorted me to the private airport. When they pushed me up the boarding stairs, the necklace around my neck was torn off, and the phoenix-leaf pendant fell to the ground.
It had been chosen by Veronica for me, the only time she had remembered, after her secretary reminded her, to give me a birthday gift, and at the villa gate, I hadn’t been able to throw it away.
Veronica frowned as she picked it up. “This… why does it look familiar?”
My heart, at that moment, skipped a beat.
But Enzo only cleared his throat twice and tugged her sleeve. “Veronica, the wind is strong. I’m cold.”
Veronica’s hesitation vanished as if it had never existed, and she casually tossed the pendant aside before raising her foot and crushing it beneath her heel.
“Drag him up there, and never let him set foot in this country again.”
The roar of the engines pressed me back into my seat, and that was fine.
She had personally sent me away and cut off the past, and from then on, we would never meet again.
…
This was Veronica’s fiftieth visit to a psychologist. The aftereffects of being abducted as a child, including face blindness, had left marks that disturbed her life.
Lincoln had been so angry this time that he hadn’t contacted her for nearly half a month.
It was her fault, because she had been too busy accompanying Enzo, but she had already broken the promise she had made as a child: she had married someone else.
She could not refuse such a small request to accompany him. This time, the therapist asked her, under hypnosis, to draw the image of that little boy, and step by step, she had to reconstruct the scenes of the abduction to heal the wound it had left behind.
Veronica thought it would be easy and assumed the sketch would inevitably look like Enzo. But when the psychologist took the drawing, he cried out in shock.
“How could it be him?”
