In Love, Never Say Never (Ashton Fuller and Scarlett Stovall) novel Chapter 591

He picked up the bottle of sulfuric acid, slowly swivelling his head to face me. An eyebrow raised, he asked in an annoyed tone, “Want me to do it for you?”

My face scrunched up out of fear, instinctively taking a step back and increasing the distance between us. “Jared, listen. There’s still a way out for you if you stop now.”

His lips pulled back in an ugly sneer. “Scared, Scarlett?”

No sh*t, Sherlock. Anyone would be.

He took slow, lazy steps towards me, and I unconsciously kept backing away from him. “Jared, you can’t bring back people from the dead, but you can still treasure the living while they’re still alive,” I tried to convince him.

He merely jeered at me, refusing to listen to anything I said as he twisted open the bottle cap.

Waving the bottle in the air menacingly, he went on to say, “You look so much like Naomi right now. She was this scared and vulnerable when she died, too. I remember thinking: she must have wanted to continue living, but she couldn’t find a good reason to do so anymore. Why couldn’t I have been her reason? Why couldn’t she have continued living for me?”

I felt my back hit a wall. I’m cornered.

Delighted by my new predicament, a wide grin spread across his face as he splashed the contents of the bottle in my direction.

I reflexively reached up and tried to cover my face with my hands, but only managed to block some of the liquid.

In the blink of an eye, I was aggressively pulled into someone’s embrace at the exact moment that I heard the blood-curdling sound of something dissolving, as well as caught a whiff of the rancid odor of rotting flesh.

A man’s voice hissed into my ear in pain as a group of people suddenly barged into the building.

When I’d finally snapped awake from my daze, I realized that it was Ashton. He’d used his own body to shield me from the sulfuric acid.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could somewhat see that all the blood was drained from Jared’s face as he stared at Ashton, dumbfounded while Ashton’s men wrestled him to the ground.

I tried to open my mouth to speak, but no words came out.

Ashton instantly fell to his knees in front of me. There was a constant ringing in my brain as I stood there blankly, watching someone else carry Ashton away.

At the hospital, I silently watched the doctors and nurses as they moved around me. It was only then that my brain finally registered that my face hurt slightly, and I realized that the sulfuric acid must have burnt some parts of my skin off.

“The burn area isn’t large. Your right eye is hurt, but the cornea isn’t damaged, so you don’t have to worry about blindness,” a doctor told me as he bandaged up my wounds.

I contemplated his words for a while. I now knew that my face and right eye hadn’t managed to escape Jared’s fury unscathed.