Chapter 2

Chapter 2: I Won’t Let You Die

At that moment, a soft, gentle voice echoed through the room. A young woman in her twenties stepped inside, her features remarkably similar to Vivian’s—about seventy percent alike. She had an innocent, almost fragile face, framed by a pale blue dress that complemented her tall, slender figure. Her presence was calm yet elegant, like a breath of fresh air in the grim basement.

“No. This little bitch still won’t talk,” Vivian said with icy disdain, casting a cold glare at the woman collapsed in a miserable heap on the floor. Despite all her relentless torture, Vivian couldn’t understand why this woman stubbornly refused to hand over the Jade Key. Just like her mother—cheap and unyielding!

Chloe glanced down at the broken figure on the ground. Her eyes gleamed with a ruthless coldness as she sneered, “Why drag this out? If you’d just give us the Jade Key, you could save yourself a lot of pain.”

Lilian lifted her head slightly, a bitter, crooked smile twisting her lips. Memories flooded her mind—her mother’s tragic death in a car crash when she was just six, the arrival of a cruel stepmother and her illegitimate half-sister barely six months younger than her. The years that followed were a nightmare: the discovery that her mother’s accident had been orchestrated by her stepmother, the kidnapping and sale into the mountains by human traffickers when she was eight—again, arranged by the same woman.

At eighteen, she was rescued and brought back to the Sinclair family, only to be destroyed once more by that “loving” stepmother and the “perfect” little sister who had ruined her reputation. At twenty, acid was thrown on her face while she slept, stealing away her beauty. And now, at twenty-three, she was trapped in this filthy, pitch-black basement, subjected to endless torture, just to keep her alive.

Lilian understood the reason they kept her breathing—it was because of her mother’s memory, the Jade Key. The thought ignited a fierce fire of anger within her eyes, yet she let out a cold, eerie laugh that echoed in the cold room.