Chapter 8

Lily's POV

The moment I signed the divorce agreement, I felt an unprecedented sense of relief.

It was like carrying a thousand-pound burden through the snow for so long and finally setting down the pack.

I didn't immediately give the agreement to Ethan. Instead, I packed the simplest climbing backpack.

I needed to go to a mountain.

Not Mount Sumeru, but an undeveloped, treacherous wild snow mountain, a satellite peak of Muztagh Ata.

I needed an extreme climb to bury the past, to say goodbye to the person I once was.

At dawn, when the first ray of sunlight shone into the villa, I shouldered my pack and left silently.

I didn't bring my phone. I only brought a GPS emergency distress device linked to a private channel with Ethan.

It was something Ethan had forcibly made me wear in the first year of our marriage.

He said, "Lily, no matter where you are in the world, as long as you press this button, I'll risk my life to save you."

How beautiful those vows sounded then, how cruel reality was now.

Three days later, I reached the glacier zone at 20,000 feet.

The weather forecast had made a fatal error.

The originally clear sky was suddenly shrouded in black clouds. A once-in-a-century massive blizzard descended without warning.

Winds whipped up the snow. Visibility instantly dropped to zero. The temperature plummeted to negative forty degrees.

I struggled through the wind searching for shelter but accidentally stepped into empty space. My entire body plunged into an ice crevasse more than thirty feet deep!

The violent impact fractured my lower leg. Icy water instantly soaked through my protective suit.

In the desperate darkness, with trembling hands, I fumbled for the GPS distress device I kept close to my body.

This was my last hope.

Without hesitation, I pressed the red SOS button.

But the next second.

The red alarm sound stopped abruptly.

At the bottom of the ice crevasse, I watched as the green light on the distress device that indicated "signal received" lit up, then instantly went dark, turning into the dead gray of "connection terminated."

I froze.

Then a heart-wrenching pain spread from deep within, ten thousand times more intense than the agony of broken bones.

He saw it.

But he cut off the signal.

He personally severed my hope of survival.

The temperature in the ice crevasse continued to drop.

My eyelashes frosted over. My consciousness began to blur.

I could no longer feel the pain in my lower leg. A strange warmth began to envelop me. This was the sign of severe hypothermia.

In the final moments of my life, what flashed through my mind wasn't fear of death, but Ethan's decisiveness in cutting off the signal.

So this is what it means when love dies. You can watch someone go to their death without blinking.

"Dad, Mom, Snowball... I'm coming to find you..."

I slowly closed my eyes, smiling as I let endless darkness completely swallow me.

I don't know how much time passed.

"There's someone here! Quick! Lower the rope!"

An urgent but powerful male voice pierced through the howling wind and snow, and I barely heard it.

Then a beam of strong light cut through the darkness of the ice crevasse.

Someone wrapped my cold, stiff body with their body warmth. Strong arms held me tightly.

"Lily! Wake up! Don't sleep! I'm taking you home!"

That voice was deep and steady, with a barely perceptible tremor.

It wasn't Ethan.

I tried to open my eyes to see who it was, but I lost consciousness completely.