Lydia smiled at him. She never could have imagined Leo would go this far—that he would actually murder his own grandmother.
She had always known his mental state was fragile. He obeyed her every word like a naive child, trusting her implicitly without a shred of doubt.
Leo loved her, treating her commands as absolute gospel. Yet this ruthless, cold-blooded killer wore the face of a harmless, gentle boy. That was the most terrifying part of all.
Juniper was locked away in a suburban house for an entire week. Her phone had been confiscated, cutting off any chance of her signal being traced.
The moment she heard about the old lady's death, she felt a massive, suffocating web closing in around her. She remembered with horrifying clarity how Leo had drugged her that night. Yet, he hadn't laid a finger on her. He had intentionally left her alive.
Was it a twisted act of mercy, or did he simply believe that even if she lived, she could never crawl her way out of this hell?
Juniper saw no one for seven straight days. Every day, a piece of plain bread was tossed through the window slot. The constant chirping of birds outside told her she was definitely not in the city.
The old lady was dead, and she was imprisoned here by Nelson's men. Given the crisis, Nelson was undoubtedly up to his neck in chaos.
She mechanically picked the bread off the floor and forced it down. Eating nothing but dry bread for a week had triggered severe stomach cramps.
But that afternoon, they didn't toss in bread. Instead, they delivered a plate of overwhelmingly spicy food.
It was as if whoever was pulling the strings was deliberately torturing her—feeding her dry bread until her stomach tore itself into knots, only to follow it up with something so fiercely spicy it would burn her from the inside out. Her only alternative was starvation.
Juniper knew Nelson was consumed by rage. She, too, was burning with a fury so intense it made her bones ache.
She couldn't stop the flood of memories—the old lady's endless kindness, the realization that taking her to the countryside to relax had all been part of a monstrous conspiracy.
Not knowing if there were cameras watching her, Juniper forced herself to eat every last bite of the burning food. Then, she clutched her stomach, dragged herself to the bathroom, and threw up until she was covered in a cold sweat. If being lucid meant enduring this agony, she would rather slip into a delirious haze.
She was given no medication. It felt as though she had been entirely forgotten.
She curled into a tight ball on the rug, clutching her stomach, every muscle in her body trembling with tension.
Perhaps it was the agonizing pain, but disjointed fragments of memory violently tore through her mind. She *had* seen Leo before. At the hospital?
But the memory was too blurry. She braced herself against the wall, stumbling back to the toilet to vomit again. By the time she cleaned herself up and dragged herself to the window, she passed out completely.
She woke up in the dead of night to find a figure sitting by her bed.
Nelson wasn't looking at her. He was staring out at the starlight, swallowed by an impenetrable, suffocating darkness.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABEL
Comments
The readers' comments on the novel: He Gave Me Hearing, Then Taught Me What Silence Really Means