Chapter 85: FURIOUS THAT I LOVE YOU

Xender's POV

“Xender, for the love of God, there is absolutely nothing wrong with your scan! It’s clean! Your skull is not even close to being broken or damaged! Why do you keep insisting that something is wrong with your brain?!”

Mike’s voice groaned with an aggressive, mounting frustration. I didn't look at him; I just kept my eyes glued to the stark, glowing image of my own skull displayed on his computer screen.

A heavy, agonizing sigh escaped me, dragging the last bit of my energy with it.

What on earth was I even doing here? It was already glaringly obvious that I was standing at a brutal crossroads with only two choices left: either I had to accept the impossible and believe that Alda was telling the absolute truth, or I had to admit that the stress of the past few weeks had finally snapped something inside my head.

“I just... I just need someone to tell me that I am not losing my mind,” I whispered, turning to face him.

Mike raised a brow at me, his features twisting into a look of total, unvarnished confusion. “Why on earth would you be losing your mind, Xender? Did something happen at the company? And where the hell is Alda anyway? Is she okay?”

The questions pelted me like stones, each one hitting a raw nerve.

“Alda is... she is...” I started, but the words choked in my throat.

A sharp, deeply frustrated sound tore from my lips. Giving up on explaining it myself, I aggressively grabbed my phone, my fingers trembling as I scrolled through my files until I found the audio recording—the heavy, terrifying conversation I had secretly caught between Alda and myself earlier this morning.

“I want you to listen to this,” I muttered.

I hit play. The moment her voice began to bleed through the phone's speaker, the walls of the office felt like they were closing in on me. I stood up abruptly, my boots pacing a frantic, erratic path across Mike’s floor as pure psychological distress gripped my chest.

For five agonizing minutes, the recording filled the room. Then, unable to take it anymore, Mike reached out and decisively paused it. He slowly raised his head, his gaze traveling up to meet mine, searching my face as if praying this was all some sick, twisted joke.

“What on earth... what is this, Xender?” he asked, his voice dropping into a tense, breathless quiet.

“It is exactly what you just heard,” I blurted out, my pacing increasing, my hands flying to my hair as I fought to keep from completely unraveling. “I mean, since the very day I found her, she has been acting so off! I could swear I told you this before, Mike, but we just waved it off as trauma. We thought it was just shock! But this... this is becoming something entirely different. It's too serious.”

I stopped in front of his desk, my chest heaving. “She leaves the house without a single person knowing where she went. No one sees her leave, no one sees how she gets past the security, and then she just... appears right back in her room. Through all of it, I have never once seen her use the front gate. I can’t believe I was so stupid. I forgot to check my own home’s CCTV after the first time I searched the entire building looking for her!”

The words poured out of me in a frantic, desperate rush. I turned to Mike, expecting to see a reflection of my own shock, or at least a matching look of terror on his face. But he wasn't panicked. He was just calmly seated in his leather chair, staring blankly out into the room, looking entirely lost in his own clinical thoughts.

Frustration flaring, I marched over and aggressively waved a hand right in front of his face, needing him to snap out of it, needing him to save me from the ledge I was standing on.

“Hello! Why are you spacing out on me right now when I am telling you this is serious?!” I demanded, my voice cracking.

Mike blinked, slowly looking up at me. “So... let me get this completely straight. Alda is claiming she was murdered... but she was saved by an elf?”

I nodded violently. “Yes!”

“She keeps insisting she was killed,” I let out, running another frantic hand through my hair, my scalp burning from the tension. “But how is something that is dead supposed to be walking around and alive right now? Tell me how that makes any sense!”

“Okay, first, I need you to calm the hell down,” Mike said, his doctor's tone cutting through my panic like a blade. “At this rate, you are going to drive yourself into a psych ward before we can even figure out what is actually going on here.”

Without another word, he leaned forward and hit play again, letting the rest of the recording run until the very last word faded into a heavy silence.

When it ended, Mike didn't say a word. He just gave me a long, unreadable stare before slowly looking away. His calm was driving me insane. I knew Mike; he had always possessed a deep fascination for psychology, even if he hadn't fully pursued it as a career. But his silence right now wasn't comforting—it felt like a rejection.

“Well, say something!” I demanded, my voice echoing off the walls.

“Look, Xender, I don't know if you’ve noticed, but I am a medical doctor, not a psychologist,” Mike said, a sharp wave of frustration finally bleeding into his tone. “But I am trying to look at this through a medical lens. Alda is not the first patient I have seen who went through a brutal, near-death, deeply traumatizing experience only to wake up claiming they actually died.”

He stood up, leaning against his desk. “Some patients wake up claiming they can hear phantom voices. Others swear up and down they can see dead people walking around. Hell, some even claim they met God Himself on the operating table. Now, I wouldn't know if any of that is objectively true or false. What I do know is that Alda went through an unspeakable amount of pain—a horror nobody deserves to experience—and it is taking an immense psychological toll on her mind. And maybe... just maybe, you should stop pacing around my office looking like a mentally unstable person yourself, and go take care of her.”

The harsh words slapped me in the face. It was entirely clear now: Mike didn't believe a single word on that tape. He wasn't seeing a supernatural mystery; he was just dismissing it all as the shattered, stressed-out mind of a trauma patient who had snapped under the weight of her suffering.

“Now go home and get some rest,” Mike said, his voice softening slightly but remaining firm. “You look like you’re about to pass out on my floor at any given second. I have other patients to attend to. And Xender? Make sure you tell her that you believe her. She needs every ounce of support she can get right now. Just do that... and then maybe we can book her a proper therapist. Someone she can actually open up to.”

With that, he picked up his chart, walked past me, and left the office.

What the hell was I thinking coming here? I thought bitterly, staring at the empty doorway. Did I really think a medical scan was going to give me the answers I was bleeding for?

A wave of intense, sickening guilt crashed through me as I remembered the company. After watching that CCTV footage of Anna’s incident with the police, I felt even worse. The camera had shown everything—Anna panicking at nothing, scrambling away from a stationary Alda, and falling entirely on her own. I had handled the situation horribly. I had looked at Alda with suspicion. I had pushed her even further away from me when all I wanted—all I have ever wanted—was to pull her close. To be the one person she could run to, the one person she could trust. Instead, I just keep driving a wedge between us.

Shaking, I grabbed my phone from the desk and made my way out of Mike's office, feeling more broken and devastated than I ever had in my life.

But before I could even get to my car to drive home, to find Alda and beg for her forgiveness on my knees, my phone violently vibrated in my palm. I pulled it up. It was a call from the downtown hospital where the ambulance had taken Anna.

My heart skipped a beat as I answered. The nurse on the other end spoke quickly—apparently, they had tried contacting Anna's family, but nobody was picking up. Since I was the only person who had stayed on the scene and cared enough to report the incident, they were calling to notify me that her situation was critical.

When the call clicked off, I checked the time on my dashboard. It was almost five in the evening. Hours had passed since Alda had walked away from the company. A desperate, suffocating need to find her tore at my chest, but the sheer urgency in the nurse's voice was an anchor I couldn't ignore. I couldn't just leave Anna to die alone.

With a loud, frustrated curse, I dialed Charles’s number. I needed him to drop whatever he was doing, drive straight to my house, and check on Alda while I handled the nightmare at the hospital. I waited, the line ringing out into empty space. He didn't pick up.

“God damnit! I should have gotten her a new phone by now!” I muttered in pure, unadulterated frustration, slamming my hand against the steering wheel before putting the car in drive and tearing down the street toward the hospital.

Charles’s POV

I pulled the car into the quiet compound and brought it to a smooth stop. Shifting into park, I turned around in my seat, my eyes instantly softening as I looked at the precious little figure strapped securely into her toddler car seat in the back. She was fast asleep, her tiny chest rising and falling peacefully.

My emotions over the past twenty-four hours had been a brutal, overwhelming rollercoaster. Discovering Elara’s existence had completely shattered my world in the best way possible. She was beautiful. She was everything I could have ever asked for in a daughter.

“Thank you so much for dropping us off, Charles,” Emily’s soft voice broke through my thoughts.

I turned back to the front, a small, genuine smile instantly taking over my lips as I looked at her. “I'm just glad I could be here, Em. Let me help you carry her inside before I head out.”

Emily nodded, a grateful smile touching her face as she gathered Elara’s heavy diaper bags into her arms and stepped out of the car.

I jumped out immediately, taking the heaviest bag from her hands before reaching into the backseat to gently unbuckle Elara. I lifted her up carefully in her car seat carrier so as not to wake her, while Emily hurried ahead to unlock the front door.

She led me straight down the familiar hallway to her bedroom, where a small, cozy toddler bed was already neatly made for Elara. Once we stepped inside, Emily carefully lifted the sleeping girl out of the carrier and settled her under the blankets, while I quietly dropped the bags onto the floor.

I stood back by the doorway, unable to stop myself from watching her. There was an incredibly painful, beautiful naturalness to the way she tucked our daughter into bed. She moved with so much grace, stepping over to her wardrobe and coming back to the bedside with a fresh pair of socks and a pair of soft pajamas.

“Let me quickly change her out of these clothes and into these, and then I’ll join you outside,” Emily whispered, her eyes meeting mine over the bed.

We both paused. The heavy, unresolved tension that had been stretching between us for years suddenly felt incredibly thick in the quiet room. I couldn't deny it to myself anymore—everything was happening so fast, but deep down in the dark corners of my heart, I knew my feelings for her hadn't changed a single bit over the last three years.

Just standing a few meters away from her, a desperate, aching urge washed over me. All I wanted to do was step across the room, pull her into my arms, and hold her until the world faded away. I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to feel her heart beating against mine again.

But I just found myself frozen, hesitating.

All this time, I had carried so much suffocating anger inside me. I had forced myself to believe I was angry because she left, or because I thought she had aborted our child. But standing here, looking at her, the terrifying truth hit me: I was actually angry because, even without the knowledge of Elara, I had never stopped loving her. I was furious because all I wanted to do was hate her, and I couldn't.

But with Elara finally here, I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to react. I figured that keeping things strictly simple between us—focusing entirely on being parents—was the safest bet until we could both sort through the wreckage of our feelings. I didn't even know if the anger was truly gone, or if I had genuinely forgiven her for throwing everything we had away and lying to my face. All I knew, with a terrifying certainty, was that I loved her.

“Are you sure... are you sure you don't want to stay and have some dinner with me?” Emily asked, her voice dropping, sounding incredibly vulnerable and nervous.

I looked at her, seeing the hesitation in her own eyes. I knew we both needed more time to heal, to sort ourselves out from the past. Maybe, if we gave it time, things would come back to us naturally—just like the way we used to be.

“No,” I replied softly, forcing myself to decline the offer. “I have something urgent I need to sort out for Xender.”

“Oh,” Emily’s face fell slightly, but she managed a quick nod, pulling her hands into her lap. “I completely understand.”

I gave her one last lingering, reassuring smile and turned toward the door to leave. But before I could take a single step out of the room, her hand shot out, her fingers wrapping tightly around my wrist, stopping me in my tracks.