Chapter 183: Even With My Eyes Open

ADRIEN’S POV

"Adrien, stop!" Timothy had screamed, grabbing my shoulders and shaking me frantically while I lay on the wooden floor, laughing hysterically. "Stop it! What is wrong with you? Why are you laughing like that? Please, Adrien!"

"I don’t know!" I screamed back, my jaw aching, my chest spasming painfully as forced laughter ripped through me. "I can’t stop, Timothy! I can’t stop!"

And deep down, I felt like I was going completely insane, trapped inside a body that was laughing itself to death.

Then the laughing abruptly stopped, and the real poison took over. I started retching and throwing up violently over the porcelain sink and the floor.

I broke out into a cold sweat and horrific, burning hives, my skin turning bright red and itching like liquid fire. And then, as Timothy held me, the whites of my eyes turned a dull, sickly yellow.

"Adrien, your eyes!" Timothy had cried out, his voice breaking into terrified sobs as he held my sweating forehead while I heaved and retched. "Your eyes are yellow! What did you swallow? What did you do to yourself?"

"I just took a drop," I had gasped between heavy, excruciating dry heaves, shivering violently on the floor, clutching my stomach as pain ripped through my intestines. "Just a drop... please... it hurts..."

Even with the way I screamed, even with the way I wept and begged Timothy and the resort nurse to save me while they pumped my stomach with charcoal fluid, all I really wanted to do was live.

That was the bitter, undeniable irony of it all.

I had taken that drop thinking I wanted to die, thinking I wanted an escape from Alice’s grip. But the second the pain set in, the second my body began to fail, the raw, primal urge to survive took over. I screamed for help. I begged for my life. I fought with everything I had just to draw another breath.

All I wanted was to live.

If I did not want to live, if I truly did not care about my own life or death, I would never have let Orion rope me into a fake engagement from the very beginning when we met again all these years later.

I would have let him kill me, or I would have walked away and let the world consume me. But I clung to Orion’s deal because, despite every trauma, despite every bruise, despite three years on the street and a lifetime of abuse, some pathetic part of me desperately wanted to stay alive.

I sit here in the jet seat now, looking down at my trembling hands resting on my knees.

I don’t remember ever consciously acknowledging that I took a drop of that poison to end my life. In my head, up until this exact moment, I had convinced myself that I had just hidden the vial away, terrified of Alice and terrified of Orion.

Why would seventeen-year-old me want to kill himself instead of giving the poison to Orion? Wouldn’t it have been easier to kill Orion instead?

Not easier in the sense that I would have gotten away with it, but easier in the sense that I could have just done it— handed him a poisoned glass, let him drink it, and been done with Alice’s demands once and for all.

That’s when the weight of it truly hits me.

My memories are coming back.

Things that were foggy, things that I have pushed into the deepest shadows of my mind for years, are now becoming crystal clear to me. They are rising to the surface effortlessly and I don’t know what to do with that truth.

I already knew that I had massive gaps in my memory, but remembering it in this way— so easily, like it had been waiting for me right behind a thin curtain in my own head— hits me with brutal force.

There is a lot more to everything than anyone ever thought, even me. I wish I could go back into my head as a seventeen-year-old boy and see exactly what was going through my mind. I wish I had never forgotten in the first place.

"You’re looking a bit pale, darling," Orion says.

His voice is calm and steady, slicing cleanly through the chaotic storm in my mind.

I turn my head slowly to look at him, my hands still a bit shaky against my trousers, my voice rising in a quick defensive shield.

"How does it not look like I’m fine?" I ask him, my eyes narrowing as I glare at his stupid face. "What’s your business?"

Orion does not even blink at my tone. He sits there calmly, looking at me with those unreadable eyes, completely unbothered by my hostile tone.

"Perhaps you are celebrating your stepmother’s disappearance?" Orion asks smoothly, his voice carrying that usual faint, dangerous tone. "Do you wish she were dead?"

I stare at him, my breath catching slightly in my throat.

Looking into Orion’s glittering eyes, I know the truth. I know that if I open my mouth right now and tell him that I wish with all my heart that she were dead, Alice would be dead before the sun sets, and her body would never be found again.

I know Orion is not the one who took her. I saw the genuine flicker of surprise in his eyes when he first read the message back in Lady Dimitra’s study.

He didn’t order her disappearance. But at the same time, I know with absolute certainty that if I look him in the eye and say the word, Orion would hunt her down and end her life without hesitating for even a second.

Realizing that power, realizing the lethality of the man sitting right next to me, something twisted and dark worms deep inside my chest, turning my stomach over.

I say nothing.

I tear my gaze away from Orion, turning my head back toward the oval window, staring out at the endless, dirty gray clouds floating beneath the wings of the jet.

I wonder if this is why seventeen-year-old Adrien took that drop of poison first before giving the glass to Orion. Perhaps that scared, desperate boy thought that dying by his own hand in that cabin room was better than killing this dangerous, unpredictable creature sitting next to me now.

But even as I sit here, high above the earth, with my memories returning piece by piece, I am still not entirely sure what seventeen-year-old me was thinking back then, and I don’t know what I am going to do now.

First things first, though.

I need to find Louise.