Chapter 1005

A sharp ache squeezed my chest, and I stepped closer, wrapping my arms tightly around him. I rested my cheek against his chest, listening to the frantic rhythm of his heartbeat as I whispered, “Ethan, giving you the antidote was the right choice. It’s one decision I’ve never regretted. Think about it — if you were the one who’d been poisoned, Brian hates you so much that we’d have nothing to bargain with. He’d simply sit back and wait for the poison to take your life, without ever giving us an opportunity to negotiate. We’d be completely powerless. But Brian is fixated on me. He wants me. That’s why we still have a chance. We can use that to negotiate with him. So please, calm down. Don’t let the guilt weigh you down.”

His arms closed more tightly around me, pulling me firmly against him. He rested his chin on the crown of my head, but didn’t say a word.

I could tell the worry was still eating away at him. He couldn’t stop thinking about the possibility that Brian might not possess the antidote at all — or that even if he did, he might refuse to give it to us.

His thoughts had already raced through every possible disaster, leaving him convinced that there was no way forward.

Watching him struggle so badly made my heart hurt.

I understood that Melisa’s death had thrown his entire plan off track, and it was enough to make him snap. He had believed he could obtain the antidote through Melisa and deal with everything one step at a time. But now that Melisa was dead, everything he’d arranged had collapsed, leaving him unsure of what to do next.

Still, the problem was right in front of us, and there was no escaping it. All we could do was face it together.

I deliberately let out a dissatisfied little huff, then pulled my head away from his chest and looked straight at him. “Ethan, if you keep torturing yourself like this, I’ll go straight back to work. I won’t stay home and rest anymore.”

He went still for a second before immediately tightening his embrace.

The fear in his voice was impossible to miss. “No. You can’t go back to work. You need to stay home and rest properly.”

I could feel a faint tremor running through his arms. He lowered his head and buried his face against the side of my neck, his voice muffled and unusually fragile. “Lianne, I’m just scared of losing you. I’m really scared. You don’t know what was going through my head when I was standing in that abandoned shack and saw Melisa’s body. All I could think was… if she was dead, would you die too? At that moment, my mind went completely empty.”

My heart clenched. I gently rubbed his back, trying to ease the fear consuming him. “I understand. But look at me. I’m fine at the moment. I’m still in your arms, and I’m talking to you.”

His arms tightened around me again, but he remained quiet.

I leaned against him and continued in a gentle voice, “Ethan, life has never been a straight road. All the hardships I’ve gone through were meant to lead me toward the happiness we’ll have together. Think about it — if our lives hadn’t been filled with all those twists and turns, we might never have found our way to each other. I might still be running from you, while you’d still be searching everywhere for me. So all this suffering has a reason.”

He lowered his eyes to me, his gaze filled with emotions too complicated to put into words.