Lina POV:

A film of moisture gathered in my eyes, distorting the red dots on the screen into blurry, crimson smears.

I blinked them away, refusing to let them fall as I scrolled up the chat history, the pad of my finger catching and dragging against the glass.

My chest ached with a dull, throbbing pressure, and every breath I took tasted of old, rusted metal.

Every last voice message I had sent him in five years bore that same small, red mark, a testament to their unplayed status.

It had not always been this way.

I remembered the first two years.

Back then, William would pin my messages to the top of his feed.

He used to smile and tell me my voice was his sanctuary from the grim necessities of his work.

He would replay my casual, joking voice notes over and over again.

He'd insisted that listening to me talk about grocery shopping or the weather kept his humanity intact while he was scrubbing blood from beneath his fingernails.

A desperate, cultivated ignorance had led me to believe that things had not fundamentally changed.

I had reasoned with myself that even if his replies were brief, he was still making the effort to respond to me.

I had convinced myself he was simply burdened by the heavy crown of his rising power within the Family.

But the small, red dots proclaimed the unvarnished truth.

They announced that William had not truly listened to my voice in five unending years.

My hands unsteady, I navigated to the active chat history between William and Sophie once again.

My gaze caught upon their latest exchange from this very afternoon.

Sophie had sent a fifty-nine-second voice note, and with a masochist's curiosity, I tapped the voice-to-text transcript option, seized by the fear that playing the audio itself would alert him.

Her rendered words filled the luminous screen, a cloying, whining complaint that the office coffee was too bitter and had ruined her day.

I looked at William's detailed, typed reply beneath it.

He told her he remembered she hated bitterness and preferred coconut milk, and that he had already ordered a special drip coffee to be delivered to her desk.

Beneath another short voice note from Sophie, William had replied that he would take her to an exclusive private kitchen tonight-one that demanded a two-week reservation.

He had hired its executive chef just for her.

I sat there in the airless silence, comparing his meticulous care for her against his chilling apathy toward me.

Only a few days ago, I had been wrestling with a 103-degree fever.

I had collapsed on the cold grout of the bathroom floor, shivering uncontrollably, unable to risk a public hospital because of the targets his enemies had fixed upon us.

I had sent him a feverish voice message, begging him to send the Family's underground doctor.

He had immediately replied with a single, typed word: Understood.

He never returned that night.

I suffered alone in this massive, guarded estate, waiting for a help that never materialized.

He at last came home the next day at noon, tossing a plastic bag of tepid takeout soup on the counter.

He claimed the Syndicate's security system had crashed and he had to work through the night.

I realized now that his so-called all-nighter had been a solicitous dinner with another woman.

His aseptic Understood had not been an acknowledgment; it was a flat, careless shrug in the face of my own life.

The abrupt cessation of running water from the bathroom jerked me back to the present.

I drew in a shaky breath and calmly exited the encrypted communications app.

I navigated back to the food delivery app and absentmindedly ordered two bowls of plain noodle soup.

I set the phone screen-down on the bedside table just as William stepped out of the bathroom.

He was drying his dark, wet hair with a towel, rivulets of water trailing down the hard planes of his sculpted chest as he walked over to me.

He leaned down and naturally pressed a slow kiss to the top of my head.

He smelled of expensive cedarwood body wash and billowing steam.

"Did you order food, sweetheart?" he asked gently. "Thank you for arranging a simple dinner. I have a splitting headache from staring at numbers today."

His tone was flawlessly, nauseatingly tender.

I looked up at his handsome, untruthful face.

I did not flinch. I did not scream.

"The order's placed," I said, my voice a monotone, devoid of inflection.

Lina POV:

In the middle of dinner, William suddenly reached across the table and laid his hand over mine.

His thumb began to trace the bones of my knuckles.

"Friday is our seventh anniversary," he said, his eyes fixed upon mine.

"I booked that French restaurant you've always wanted to visit. I'll come home early to celebrate."

A muscle in my throat tightened.

Looking at his handsome face in the dim light of the dining room, I felt a sudden, treacherous wave of weakness.

For a brief second, it felt like the boy who used to run errands in the lashing rain just to buy me roasted chestnuts had returned.

I began to doubt my own painful, recent realizations.

I allowed myself to think that he might just be overwhelmed with Syndicate business.

Maybe mentoring new associates like Sophie was just a tedious duty the Boss had forced on him.

Like a desperate gambler, I chose to deceive myself.

I decided to give William-and us-one last chance.

On Friday evening, I intentionally wore the crimson dress he had gifted me on our first date.

William returned home unusually early, as he had promised.

He was dressed in a sharp, formal black suit, waiting in the foyer.

A trace of genuine admiration flashed in his dark eyes as he watched me walk down the stairs.

We walked out to his car.

He opened the passenger door for me, carefully shielding my head with his palm to prevent me from hitting the door frame-a forgotten gesture from our past.

He complimented how beautiful I looked tonight, his voice low and smooth. He then produced a velvet box from his pocket and slipped a massive diamond seventh-anniversary ring onto my finger.

He started the engine, and our favorite old song played softly through the car's speakers.

The atmosphere was as warm and perfect as a honeymoon.

We were halfway to the restaurant when the car's Bluetooth suddenly rang, its chime slicing through the quiet.

The caller ID flashed on the dashboard screen: Sophie, R&D Dept.

William tapped the screen to answer without a moment's pause.

The call connected, and Sophie's panicked voice filled the enclosed space of the car.

She was choking on tears, reporting a burst water pipe in her luxury penthouse.

She cried about wet wires sparking and how terrified she was of being all alone in the dark.

The easy smile vanished from William's face instantly.

He slammed on the brakes, the seatbelt digging hard into my collarbone.

He violently spun the steering wheel, making an illegal U-turn in the middle of a busy intersection.

Tires screeched against the slick asphalt.

He stepped hard on the gas, accelerating wildly in the opposite direction.

He at last glanced at me, frozen in the passenger seat.

His brow was furrowed, his eyes full of an urgent panic I had not witnessed in years.

"Sophie is a young woman alone in the city," he explained quickly, his tone clipped and defensive.

"The electrocution risk is high. I have to go check on her."

The car screeched to a halt by the curb.

He did not grab an umbrella from the back seat. He did not ask if I was okay.

"Get out and call an Uber to the restaurant," he urged, his hand already on the gear shift.

"I will join you as soon as I am done."

I was forced out of the car before I even had a chance to speak a word.

I stood on the sidewalk as the rain poured down from the pitch-black sky.

Rainwater struck the silk of my dress with a dull, slapping sound, the soaked fabric clinging like a cold serpent's skin to the length of my back.

I watched William's car shoot into the curtain of rain like an arrow.

Its taillights quickly blurred into a distant red dot, then vanished completely.

The driving rain battered my face, ruining my styled hair and my makeup.

My stomach churned violently.

The still-healing appendicitis scar on my lower right abdomen began to throb with a sharp, familiar pain-a phantom echo of betrayal.

I recalled a stormy night exactly two weeks ago.

I had suffered an acute appendicitis attack.

I was rolling on the living room floor in agony, sweating through my clothes, too weak to even stand.

I was crying as I sent William voice notes, begging him to come home and take me to the clinic.

I had sent him three desperate messages.

Three minutes later, he had replied.

"Busy."

I remembered crawling to the front door through blinding pain that night to unlock it for the paramedics.

The underground doctor told me later that if they had arrived twenty minutes later, my appendix would have ruptured and I would have died.

I stood in the rain, trembling from a cold that was not entirely physical.

I realized that in William's eyes, Sophie's leaking apartment was a matter of life and death.

My own desperate pleas for survival were met with a casual dismissal.

I suddenly understood, with a clarity that felt like a shard of glass in my gut, that William no longer loved me.

His love had died the moment he sent that very first automated reply, the moment he ignored that first frightened voice message.

The freezing wind scattered the very last shred of hope in my heart, leaving behind only a hard, brittle resolve.

I did not call an Uber to the expensive French restaurant.

I turned around and walked down the concrete stairs into the subway station to head home.

An hour later, I pushed the front door open.

I went straight to the bedroom, opened the depths of the closet, and grabbed the handle of my massive black suitcase, prepared to unmake my life.