Cold Husband Burning Regret: The Divorce He Couldn't Handle novel Chapter 282

Evander’s face was dark, his expression clouded, and he said nothing.

Meanwhile, at the far end of a hallway in a small suburban clinic, a woman’s anguished cries echoed through the corridor.

The room at the end was an operating room.

Tricia lay strapped to the surgical table, her right hand cut open, the tendons exposed—no anesthesia, no mercy. When she passed out from the pain, they forced her awake, tormenting her until she could barely feel her own hand, until even the pain itself faded into numbness.

Her eyes stared up at the ceiling, hollow and blank. All she could do was repeat, over and over, that she wanted to see Evander.

The doctor led Natalie and Evander into the room.

Evander looked down at Tricia—frail, broken, and pitiful—without a flicker of emotion on his face.

Tricia couldn’t move. Tears streamed from the corners of her eyes. “Evander… Evander, you promised you’d protect me. Why… why have you changed?”

The others lingered at the doorway, leaving only Evander and Tricia in the bright, sterile room.

He watched the slow drip of the IV, his voice cold and steady. “You want me to keep protecting you while you commit crimes—while you kill?”

She thrashed weakly, her voice raw with desperation. “I didn’t kill anyone! It was an accident, all of it!”

“Does it really make a difference?” Evander’s gaze was icy as he looked down at her. “Tricia, I know I owe you for everything over the past ten years, and I’ve paid that debt. Even your son, Hans Winthrop—I’ve treated him fairly.”

“But what about you? What have you done in my name?” He let out a bitter, humorless laugh. “I can’t believe it’s taken me ten years to see what you really are—a snake in the grass.”

He called her a snake…

Tricia’s eyes, raw and red, curved into a twisted smile. “If I hadn’t been like this, I’d have died a long time ago. You know what my adoptive father was like. I never learned to be selfless—I only learned how to survive. At least before I met you, that was my life—pure hell.”

“Evander, I keep thinking… if I’d been the one to marry you six years ago, maybe we’d have been happy. Maybe I wouldn’t have ended up like this.”

“Evander, answer me!”

How could he possibly know?

“District General Hospital. You were there six years ago.” Evander’s eyes were sharp and cold, not a trace of feeling left. “You registered as a patient—ten weeks pregnant, trying to save the baby. But we hadn’t broken up. I’d never even touched you. So tell me, who really betrayed whom?”

If Charlotte hadn’t told him she was feeling unwell, if he hadn’t gone to the women’s clinic with her, he never would have known that Tricia Winthrop had been a patient there six years ago, listed under his name as next of kin.

Tricia’s tears flowed harder, her voice breaking. “It’s not like that… I didn’t want any of it, Evander, I was forced!”

“Funny,” he said, voice utterly unmoved. “Would someone who was forced want to keep the baby?”

He shook his head, his tone final. “But it doesn’t matter anymore. There’s nothing left between us—no debt, no love.”

He turned to leave.

Tricia called out after him, desperate. “Don’t you want to know who saved you all those years ago, when you were kidnapped?”