Chapter 4

The car door was wrenched open with brute force, metal screeching against metal.

Vincent Graves stood outside, his face full of fury, his suit spattered with mud and water.

"Adeline Harding, what were you doing back there? Do you have any idea how dangerous that was!"

His voice was thick with accusation and anger.

But the moment his gaze landed on me, it cut off abruptly.

I was too weak to even lift my head. My life countdown had only five minutes left.

By now my legs had completely turned into faintly glimmering gray sand.

The grains drifted out through the gaps in the wrecked cabin, dissolving little by little into the air on the wind.

Lavinia Fox came up from behind Vincent. She looked at my vanishing legs, a flicker of panic crossing her face, but she quickly slipped back into a fragile, delicate expression.

"Mr. Graves, is Miss Harding pulling some holographic projection trick again to frighten me?"

Vincent ignored Lavinia.

He stood frozen in place, as if struck by lightning.

"Adeline... where are your legs?"

Vincent's voice began to shake. He suddenly shoved Lavinia aside and lunged toward the car seat.

He reached out both hands, wanting to pull me into his arms the way he always had.

But when his hands touched my body, they passed straight through my empty chest.

He grasped nothing but a handful of cold air.

The need for control he'd been so proud of shattered utterly in that instant, and his face showed a terror and despair I had never seen in him.

"Adeline! What is going on? Don't scare me, I'll call a doctor right now!"

He clawed frantically at the scattered gray sand, but the grains slipped mercilessly through his fingers.

Watching him finally break down, I felt nothing but immense satisfaction.

With my right hand—the only part of me that still held physical form—I gently patted his cheek, pale as paper.

This was the last touch I would leave him.

No resentment, only utter indifference and cold charity.

"Vincent Graves, your gratitude disgusts me."

Countdown at zero. Soul Severance complete.

The System's notification blared inside my mind.

My body crumbled in an instant in the first ray of dawn.

I turned into a sky full of drifting ash, burying Vincent completely within it.

In this cruel world the male lead had built, I severed every bond and every last attachment.

Vincent knelt in despair amid the ashes, and the plain hoop earring—the one thing I had never taken off—gave a crisp, ringing sound.

It landed right in his mud-stained palm.