Too Late To Hold Me Novel by Rely _ Novel




Too Late To Hold Me Chapter 01

A freezing night at minus fifty degrees.
Through the bulletproof glass, I watched my seven-year-old son smugly alter the access code.
"Daddy, lock the door and freeze her for half an hour. I guarantee she'll kneel outside and beg you not to abandon her."
The man known as the apocalypse's strongest tyrant lazily twirled his military knife, not even lifting an eyelid.
"Half an hour isn't enough. Let her freeze until she cries out loud."
They didn't know that half an hour ago, I had just personally cremated my best friend who took a bite for me in the zombie horde.
And I had no intention of crying.
I simply and calmly took off the electronic collar around my neck that marked me as "Victor Sterling's property," and threw it into the ice hole at my feet.
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The snowstorm was like a barbed steel knife, scraping against my cheeks again and again.
Cold.
So cold that the chill seeped into the very marrow of my bones.
I looked down at the rusty tin can I was holding in my arms.
A thin layer of frost had already formed on its iron surface.
Inside was my best friend, Maya Jenkins.
Half an hour ago, she was still a living person who would fight me red in the face over half a piece of moldy hardtack.
Now, she was reduced to a handful of ashes.
Along with my heart, which had been ground down by the apocalypse for seven years yet still tried to warm a father and son—it too had turned to ashes.
I raised my head and looked into the villa through that expensive one-way bulletproof glass.
Inside, it was as warm as spring.
The mutated wood in the fireplace was burning brightly, making soft crackling sounds.
Victor sat on a sofa draped in pure white snow fox fur.
He wore a thin black shirt with the collar slightly open, revealing a hideous old scar on his collarbone.
It was left behind from when he saved me years ago.
It was because of this scar, because of this debt of gratitude.
That I stayed by this gloomy, temperamental man's side for three whole years like an undignified accessory.
It took three years for me to make this deeply insecure paranoid barely believe that I wouldn't leave him.
When I was twenty, we registered our marriage in the safe zone.
The following year, I risked half my life to give birth to his son, Leo Sterling, in this apocalypse lacking doctors and medicine.
I thought that with a child, his insane possessiveness and anxious neuroticism would get a little better.
But I was wrong.
Even when Leo turned seven, he still hadn't given me the genetic ring symbolizing the base's matriarch.
He merely locked me up with an electronic collar equipped with a self-destruct explosive device.
He was always restless.
He tested my bottom line in an extremely sick way.
To prove that I loved him, he would deliberately cut off the heating in my room during freezing weather.
He would watch coldly as I shivered from the cold, until I couldn't take it anymore and crawled into his bed crying, begging him to hold me.
Only then would he show a satisfied smile, stroking my hair as if I were a pet.
"Chloe, you see, you can't leave me."
To test if I would get jealous.
He would even deliberately reward extremely precious fresh vegetables and winter supplies to other women in the base who tried to climb into his bed, right in front of me.
If I showed even the slightest bit of indifference, he would go crazy.
He would choke my neck, his eyes bloodshot, demanding to know if I truly loved him.
I was so tired.
Living on a tightrope like this had drained all my spirit and energy.
My son, Leo, followed his example perfectly.
He perfectly inherited Victor's lightning ability, becoming the little genius everyone fawned over at the base when he was only six.
And he never learned to show me any respect, either.
In his mind, his father was a god sitting high above.
His mother was a useless piece of trash without even a mutant ability, a parasite who could only survive on his father's charity.
Whenever I accidentally knocked over a glass of water, he would look at me like I was absolute garbage.
"Chloe, you're so useless. You can't even hold a glass of water right. No wonder Daddy says you need to be taught a lesson constantly."
He wasn't even willing to call me "Mommy."
At this very moment.
That biological son of mine who despised me for being useless was resting on another woman's lap like a docile puppy.
That woman was Lily Sinclair.
She was the base's newly arrived high-tier healing awakened mutant.
She was beautiful, her mutant ability was powerful, and she spoke with a gentle softness, just like an innocent girl from before the apocalypse.
Lily was using her fair, tender hands—the very hands that had just healed the base's wounded—to peel an extremely rare seedless grape and feed it into Victor's mouth.
Victor didn't refuse.
He chewed the grape absentmindedly, his gaze occasionally drifting toward the blizzard outside the door.
I knew he was waiting.
He was waiting for me to frantically pound on the glass, just like I had done countless times before.
Waiting for me to tearfully hurl accusations at Lily.
Waiting for me to turn hysterical as I fought for his affection.
Leo held the tablet that controlled the security access for the entire villa.
A scarlet warning symbol flashed on the screen.
It was the record of him personally erasing my iris access just moments ago.
I watched Leo excitedly claim credit from Victor.
Because the glass was perfectly soundproof, I couldn't hear the laughter inside.
But I could clearly read Leo's lips.
"Daddy, that useless woman actually dared to run out without making me breakfast today. We have to teach her a lesson!
"Aunt Lily is right. A disobedient dog should be left out to freeze."
I stood in the blizzard at minus fifty degrees.
My eyelashes were weighed down by heavy ice crystals.
My vision began to blur.

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