Chapter 135: I Need To See You
April grabbed her phone from the table and dialed his number.
The line rang twice before his deep voice boomed smoothly through the line. "Sweetheart. Missing me already? We only hung up a few hours ago."
"Where are you?" April asked, cutting right through his tone, her eyes rigidly tracking the flashing crimson warning box. "I need you to come pick me up right now. We need to go somewhere."
"Sorry, sweetheart, I’m kinda occupied with some business right now," Nat murmured over the line. "But I can wrap things up and come over in the next four hours. That okay?"
"No," April snapped instantly.
In four hours, you will already be a corpse, she thought fiercely as her jaw tightened, her usual composure breaking at the edges.
This wasn’t about her personally worrying over his life—it was about his utility value. If he died, her access to the black market collapsed. But she couldn’t say that out loud; revealing that would only complicate the situation.
But somehow... It felt like she was desperately reminding herself what all this was, trying to justify her actions towards why she was so nervous, and why her composure was breaking.
"Why the rush?" Nat asked, his tone dropping into a slightly sharper, more observant frequency. "Is something happening? Did you see something?"
"I..." The words suddenly got completely stuck in her throat. It wasn’t because of any external or inner force, but because of a sudden, brutal calculation running through her mind.
If she told Nat right now that a cleanup squad from the Scorpion Gang was coming and that he had a traitor in his midst, he wouldn’t run.
He possessed the stubborn, volatile ego of an underworld king, a psychopath who believed he thrived and found entertainment in the most dangerous situations. He would deliberately stay in place to hunt down the traitor and wait for the scorpions to arrive just to slaughter them.
And in that chaotic process, the ambush would still happen, and he would still bleed out. This man completely lacked the cognitive senses of a regular person—normal people run from danger; Nat Collins ran toward it.
If she couldn’t warn him, she had to think bigger. She had to pull him out using a different variable.
"I need to see you," she suddenly said, the words leaving her lips before she could even consciously process them. "In all honesty, I need to see you. So, can you... come to me?"
The moment the sentence hung in the air, April mentally began to beat herself up. Why did I say something like that? She wasn’t some deeply sentimental person, nor was she someone so incredibly important that a mafia lord would abandon his syndicate operations just because she claimed she wanted to see him.
She squinted her eyes tight, cursing her own rashness. Perhaps she had let the sudden 80% trust notification get to her head. Just because he had been talking to her with that annoying familiarity didn’t mean he would drop everything. She had definitely gotten ahead of herself.
"Mr. Collins—" she started, trying to aggressively walk the statement back.
"Call me Nat," he cut her off smoothly, his voice dropping into an unusually quiet, low resonance. "Just Nat."
"Nat?" she blinked.
"Yeah, that’s right, sweetheart," he chuckled, a rich, dark sound vibrating over the speaker. "So, let me get this straight. You saying you need to see me... means you actually miss me, right?"
April opened her mouth to deliver a flat, deadpan denial, but her eyes suddenly froze on the system screen floating in the air.
Right before her eyes, the bright crimson [CRITICAL DANGER: Death Imminent] warning began to flicker. The red font slowly faded, the countdown dissolving into thin air until the screen returned to a stable, clear blue.
What... What just happened? April thought, her mind experiencing an absolute calculation error. The mortality path had completely changed just from his decision to leave the house.
"Sweetheart, did I get that right?" Nat asked, just to confirm and in her confusion, she responded,
"Yes?" she murmured into the receiver.
"Then hold on to your biscuits, sweetheart. I’ll be there before you know it."
"Biscuits?" April blinked, thoroughly confused by the bizarre choice of words, but before she could say anything else, the line went completely dead.
She slowly lowered the phone from her ear, staring blankly at the screen.
Seriously, what just happened?
April stared at her darkened phone screen for a few seconds, her internal processor trying to make sense of the bizarre conversation.
One moment he didn’t want to leave his house, like there was a top secret mission he was carrying out, and the next moment, he’s telling her to hold on to her biscuits that he’d be here.
And why? Because she said he should come to her? It didn’t make sense to her and trying to think hard about it would only make her head ache.
As long as the crimson warning is gone, and there’s no more mortality warning blinding my vision, she reasoned. It didn’t matter how it had worked, only that the multi-billion-dollar backer of her future black-market pipeline was no longer scheduled to become a corpse.
Tuning out the confusion, she sat back down and finished her breakfast. Once done, she marched directly to the storage bay to get her delivery.
Stepping into the room filled with the morning’s deliveries, she initiated a swift mental command. Intake. With a seamless ripple of invisible force, the heavy crates of cat and dog food, specialized filters, feeders, and toys vanished straight into her newly upgraded level-three spatial dimension, occupying a tiny space of her massive one-million cubic meter vault.
She left out only the climbing frames, scratch posts, and a few plush toys she had selected for Rufus and Lily.
"Help me carry these up to my room," April directed the head maid she had called down.
Together with some other maids, they carried the luxury pet installations up the grand staircase.
April began assembling the structural turf near the corner of her bedroom, letting Rufus chew on a rubber toy while Lily trotted around like a queen, sniffing her new territory with absolute curiosity.