Chapter 9
The press conference was a blinding sea of camera flashes. Adrian stood at the podium, pale and hollow-eyed.
“Mr. Cross, how do you explain the reversal in the Matt Thompson case?”
“Do you admit to destroying evidence and tampering with the crime scene?”
Where is thevictim’s sister, Riley Thompson?”
He picked up the microphone, his voice quiet but carrying clearly throughout the room:
I admit that in the Matt Thompson case, I let personal feelings compromise my professional ethics, resulting in an innocent person being wrongfully accused. vill accept full legal responsibility and cooperate with authorities to reinvestigate and bring the real perpetrator to justice.”
le paused, his gaze searching the distance as if looking for something.
But first, I have something more important to do.”
efore anyone could react, he dropped the microphone and bolted from the room like a madman, leaving the crowd in shocked outcry.
lis assistant chased after him with a plane ticket.
Mr. Cross! We found her! Miss Thompson flew to Iceland!”
uring the fifteen-hour flight, Adrian barely slept. He rehearsed apologies over and over in his head-even if it meant kneeling before her, even if it meant pending his life making amends, he was willing.
eland’s northern lights were beautiful as a fairy tale, but his heart was colder than the glaciers.
e found the address-a small wooden cabin. The door was unlocked.
iside, the place was completely empty.
nly a note lay on the table. In Riley’s neat handwriting, just four words: Never see you again.
drian collapsed to the floor, crumpling the note in his trembling hands.
utside, the aurora danced across the sky, reflecting in his bloodshot eyes like a grand and cruel mockery.
le knew he’d lost her completely. From the moment he chose to believe Sophie, from the moment he pushed Riley into hell with his own hands.
his ending had been inevitable.
le’d destroyed not just her family, but all the love and trust she’d ever had for him.
he rain kept falling, washing every street in the city, but it couldn’t cleanse the blood debt in his heart.
drian curled up in the empty cabin. His eyes were vacant, staring coldly ahead.
The temperature outside had dropped to negative sixty, and he wore only the thin suit jacket-the last one Riley had pressed for him.
But he felt no cold.
A long-lost warmth enveloped him, as if it were still that summer when they first met.
In a haze, he saw a figure in front of him.
A six-year-old girl holding a little boy’s hand asked him.
“You all alone too? Wanna be friends?”
The scene flipped, and the girl yanked her hand away from his.
“Adrian, get away from me! You’re disgusting!”
His vision blurred, and Adrian felt consciousness slipping away.
In his final moments, he whispered into the arctic wind.
“Riley… I’m sorry…”
But the wind carried his words into the endless void, just like the love he’d destroyed with his own hands.
When the rescue team found him three days later, Adrian Cross was frozen solid in that cabin, clutching that crumpled note.
His eyes were still open, staring at the door as if waiting for someone who would never return.
The coroner said he’d been dead for over forty eight hours.
But only David knew the truth-Adrian Cross had died the moment Riley Thompson walked out of him.
Five years later, in a quiet corner café tucked away in Reykjavik’s old quarter.
The owner was a woman with gentle eyes and burn scars etched across her hands-faded now to delicate silver tracery. She’d learned to smile again, though the warmth never quite reached the depths of her gaze.
Regular customers knew her simply as Anna. They didn’t know about the life she’d shed like a snake’s skin, the brother whose laughter still haunted her treams, or the man who’d razed everything she’d ever cherished to ashes.
On crystalline winter nights when the aurora borealis painted ethereal brushstrokes across the sky, she’d sometimes catch herself aching for a voice that once poke her name with such exquisite tenderness it could have melted glaciers.
But those moments dissolved quickly now, like sugar in hot coffee.
he’d learned that some wounds never truly heal-you simply learn to carry the scars as part of yourself. And sometimes, that’s enough. Sometimes, surviving ecomes its own fierce victory.
News of Adrian Cross’s death had found her through stale headlines she’d accidentally discovered online. She’d felt nothing-not satisfaction, not grief, not the losure she’d once craved. Just the hollow recognition that another chapter of her buried life had finally turned to dust.
he closed the laptop with quiet finality and returned to kneading dough for tomorrow’s bread. In the morning, there would be customers to welcome, coffee to
rew, small kindnesses to offer. That was enough.
hat had to be enough.
Jutside, the northern lights performed their ancient dance across the infinite sky-beautiful and cold and utterly remote. Just like the chasm between orgiveness and forgetting. Just like the vast space between justice and peace. Just like the unbridgeable gulf between who we were and who we choose to
ecome.
uley Thompson was dead and buried.
Anna was learning, breath by breath, to live.
And perhaps, in the end, that was the only victory worth claiming.
