A complicated emotion welled up in Marcus's chest — the quiet guilt of prying into wounds that didn't belong to him, and something softer beneath it, a helpless ache for the fate of these two sisters who had been handed a life neither of them deserved.
He lowered his head slightly. When he spoke, his voice carried none of its usual calculated lightness.
"I'm sorry."
The apology was simple and unadorned, which somehow made it feel more genuine than anything elaborate could have. He meant it — not as a social courtesy, but as an acknowledgment that some things were too heavy to comment on and too real to treat lightly.
A brief silence settled over the courtyard, carried on the back of an autumn wind that stirred the grass and ruffled the edges of Elena's unfinished canvas. Neither of them spoke. In the distance, Victoria's cheerful laughter floated from the direction of the kite field, bright and untouched by the weight between them.
After a moment, Marcus gathered himself and decided to return to the reason he'd come here in the first place. He'd been so disarmed by the scene he'd walked into — that he'd nearly forgotten there was a potential crisis waiting to be addressed.
He tentatively raised his head, his gaze settling back onto Elena's profile. In the dappled autumn light, her face was almost impossible to read — serene as a lake that had learned, over years of practice, to keep its depths entirely hidden.
"Did you..." he started, keeping his tone carefully casual, "...check the school forum today?"
Elena's hand moved the paintbrush across the canvas without pausing, smooth and unhurried. She shook her head with the same lack of ceremony one might use to decline a second cup of tea.
"No. Why?"
Her reaction was entirely, infuriatingly natural. No hesitation, no micro-flicker of defensive awareness. Just mild curiosity and continued brushwork.
Marcus filed that away and tried another angle.
"Has Summer reached out to you? Sent you any messages?"
Summer Chen — Elena's only genuine friend, and was also a potential target mentioned in the original work.
"No." Elena finally set down her brush with the measured deliberateness of someone who had decided the conversation had become interesting enough to give it her full attention. She turned to look at him, and those dark, fathomless eyes settled on his face with the calm precision of someone lining up a shot. "Was it Teacher Qi who contacted you?"
Marcus's heart gave a sharp, involuntary lurch.
How did she know? How did she know Adrian contacted him?
But then a thought flashed through his mind—wait, Adrian was her teacher, and the bright moonlight in her heart. Perhaps she had been anticipating his concern.
She hadn't deduced that Adrian called. She'd hoped he had, and then recognized the shape of that hope in Marcus's questions.
From her perspective, his question was probably Adrian indirectly expressing his worry for her through him.
Marcus exhaled quietly through his nose, recalibrating. Alright. Direct approach, then.
He took a step forward, close enough that she would have to tilt her head slightly to look at him. He kept his posture open, non-threatening — a habit from his past life, the instinctive body language of someone who knew how to manage proximity with volatile people. One hand rested lightly on her slender shoulder, just enough contact to communicate that this was serious without making it feel like a confrontation.
He watched her face. Not obviously, not with the blunt scrutiny of an interrogation, but with the quiet precision he'd spent years developing — reading the architecture of expressions, the micro-shifts in muscle tension that happened faster than conscious thought.
"Veronica had an incident," he said.
The name landed between them like a stone dropped into still water.
Elena's breathing frequency did not change. Her face remained composed — no spike of alarm, no involuntary flash of satisfaction, showing no surprise, joy, or worry, and even carried a hint of indifference, as if it had nothing to do with her, translucent calm she wore like a second skin.
"What sort of incident could she possibly have?" The words were mild, faintly rhetorical, carrying the particular flavor of someone who genuinely could not fathom why this information was being brought to them.
Marcus didn't answer in words. He reached into his pocket, pulled out his phone, and navigated to the photograph Adrian had sent him. He held the screen out in front of her without commentary, letting the image do the work.
The effect was immediate, and it was not what he'd braced himself for.
Elena's gaze connected with the photograph, and something happened to her face that Marcus had not anticipated — not the cool recognition of an architect surveying their own completed work, but a genuine, unguarded recoil. Her long lashes blinked in rapid succession, like a startled bird folding its wings. The doubt and shock that surfaced in her eyes were raw and unperformed, the kind of reaction that existed below the threshold of conscious control.
She even shifted backward in her wheelchair — barely half an inch, an involuntary retreat — and her voice when it came was smaller than Marcus had ever heard it.
"This... this is actually her?"
Based on the observation skills Marcus honed on the edge of life and death in his previous life, a person's micro-expressions are often the hardest to fake, unless they are a secret agent or a scammer who has undergone extremely professional training.
Elena Nightshade was not performing innocence right now. She was experiencing it.
Could it be... it really wasn't her?
The thought unfurled slowly, careful and cautious, testing its own weight. Marcus let his mind move backward through everything he knew about Elena's methods — not from knowing her personally, but from the meticulous record the original novel had provided.
Her style of revenge, when she eventually became the novel's villainess, was characterized by a particular quality. It was precise. Clinical. It operated like a carefully constructed proof — A leads to B leads to C, and by the time anyone noticed, the conclusion was already fait accompli. Her usual methods involved precisely calculated decomposition of human tissue, or creating flawless "accidental" casualties—cold, efficient, and carrying a sense of lofty judgment.
The original work explicitly mentioned only two cases related to sexual humiliation; the victims were Veronica Xue and Summer Chen. Their patterns of victimization were almost identical—kidnapped, photographed in compromising situations, and the pictures made public.
This vulgar criminal method, carrying a strong connotation of sexual humiliation, was completely incompatible with Elena Nightshade's almost paranoid, "elegant" style of revenge.
In his previous life, he had dealt with top detectives and knew well that an invisible "chain of contempt" existed within the criminal world:
Serial killers despise savage robbers, robbers despise sneaky thieves, and all of them collectively despise the most despicable rapists. "Why commit that crime when you could do anything else" was practically a consensus.
Moreover, Elena herself had been a potential victim of such filthy desires (from Original Marcus). She knew better than anyone that the pain of such humiliation was far more unforgettable than physical injury.
How could she be willing to repeatedly use this method to rip open the deepest wounds in her heart and relive that despair and filth?
In that case, the logic holds up!
Those two sexual humiliation cases attributed to Elena were very likely framed against her!
The thought opened up a much larger and more unsettling question about who else might be operating in the shadows of this story, and what they wanted. But that was a problem for later.
Right now, Elena's face had gone several shades paler after glimpsing the details of the photograph. She abruptly turned her face away, no longer looking at the phone screen. Her breathing seemed to quicken, and her lips were tightly pressed into a straight line, showing obvious rejection and discomfort
Marcus pocketed the phone quickly. "I'm sorry. Did I frighten you?"
Elena's lashes trembled. She didn't answer immediately, and in that silence, Marcus had the unsettling sensation that the photograph had scraped against something old and deeply buried — some memory or feeling she kept walled off behind all that meticulous composure.
When she finally spoke, her voice was low and slightly stripped of its usual crispness.
"Even if she deserved whatever came to her..." A pause. The sentence stalled, like something had caught in her throat. "This is still..."
"Too cruel," Marcus finished quietly.
He hadn't meant to complete the sentence for her. It had come out of its own accord, and the moment it did, he felt the slight shift in the air between them — a fractional change in the quality of the silence, as though a taut wire had relaxed by exactly one degree.
Elena said nothing more. Her expression closed off again, not fully, but enough — a door pulled shut without being slammed. She reached for the wheelchair's control and maneuvered herself away from him, rolling toward the gentle slope at the edge of the courtyard path, her back presenting itself as a clear conclusion to the exchange.
"I'll push you," Marcus said automatically, stepping forward, hand reaching for the chair's handles.
his hand just about to touch the wheelchair's handle.
However, the petite figure in front of him had already slid away mercilessly, rejecting his help.
Her voice drifted coldly on the wind, carrying an accusation:
"Why are you telling me any of this?"
She rolled to flat ground and stopped, reclaiming her Paint brush, turning back to the canvas. and faced the canvas, yet seemed momentarily unsure where to start painting.
He settled himself onto a small wooden stool beside the easel, the kind of low, slightly undignified seat that forced him to look up at her slightly. He didn't particularly mind. He crossed his arms loosely and shrugged.
He shrugged, his tone carrying a hint of helpless teasing:
"It's not that I wanted to tell you; it's your Teacher Qi who was worried about you, afraid that something might happen to you too, which is why he contacted me."
He mused internally:
Hehe, that guy Adrian is probably worried about Elena, but constrained by her current status as a "married woman," he can only indirectly convey his concern through her "husband."
This careful consideration is quite interesting.
The clean white canvas shimmered softly in the autumn sunlight, reflecting onto Elena's snow-like profile, which seemed to be coated in a faint, warm hue, diminishing her usual sharpness and adding a touch of imperceptible softness.
The moment Adrian Qi was mentioned, the cold, 'do-not-approach' aura surrounding her seemed to quietly melt away a corner.
"Teacher Qi?" The hand holding her paintbrush paused slightly, and her voice carried a trace of almost imperceptible concern, "He called you?"