Chapter 441/I’m Not an Idiot, Julie
Chapter 441
Julie’s POV
The blood flash-froze in my veins. My knees buckled beneath the suffocating weight of sheer panic. The room spun wildly around me, dimming at the edges as if the Grim Reaper himself had pressed a cold scythe directly against my throat.
A terrifying, oxygen-depriving silence fell over the hall a quiet that felt like the split second right before a bomb detonates.
Steve’s eyes darted frantically back and forth between Robert and me. His eyebrows pulled together in lethal confusion as he caught the stone-cold stillness hardening over Robert’s face a stillness rapidly twisting into ugly, razor-sharp suspicion.
Robert took a single step forward.
That single step shook the floorboards beneath my feet. His massive frame blotted out the light overhead, flooding the air with hot, furious breaths. His dark eyes narrowed into lethal slits, his pitch-black pupils burning like embers as he mapped out every micro-expression of my blinding panic.
"I’m waiting for an answer, Steve..." Robert’s voice dropped into a low, raspy purr, rising like venom from the deepest cavern of his chest: "...What the fuck do you mean by condolences... regarding a man your sister swore was just an ex-friend who tried to force himself on her and got rejected?"
My fingers tightened around the fabric of my pink shirt, my knuckles turning stark white as tears of absolute terror welled in my eyes. I wanted to scream. I wanted to lung forward and cover Steve’s mouth with both hands, but my limbs were paralyzed bound in place by invisible iron chains.
Steve’s jaw dropped in absolute horror. His eyes widened, a sudden, horrifying realization washing over him: I hadn’t told Robert the truth. I had spun a desperate, tragic lie to save my own skin.
Steve’s bottom lip quivered. His eyes darted nervously between us, frantically trying to swallow the words he had just spewed into the room.
"I... I meant... I meant that—" Steve stammered, panic lacing his tone.
"Don’t you fucking lie to me!"
Robert roared. The sheer force of his voice rattled the foundation of the house.
In a terrifying blur of motion, Robert lunged forward. His heavy hand clamped around the collar of Steve’s shirt, hauling my brother off his feet until his toes barely scraped the floor.
Robert’s jaw flexed violently. The thick veins along his neck bulged as his dark pupils gleamed with a wild, criminal insanity. Slowly with a sickeningly deliberate pace he turned his head toward me, pinning his icy, unblinking glare onto my dead-pale face.
His voice dropped into a dangerously calm, hushed tone the kind of quiet that warned the entire ceiling was about to crash over our heads:
"Julie... look me straight in the eyes and tell me the fucking truth. Who the hell is Ethan?... And why is your brother offering me condolences for his death?!"
I swallowed hard, my throat completely bone-dry. My legs trembled violently under the suffocating weight of his icy glare. My chest constricted so tightly it felt as though thick wire was wrapping around my throat, choking out my lungs.
Robert stood over Steve like a towering mountain, his iron grip anchored around my brother’s shirt with unyielding force, while his eyes rained deadly sparks of paranoia and madness down on me.
My quivering eyes silently begged Steve, sending desperate, silent pleas for him to fix this nightmare. But Steve was fighting just to breathe under Robert’s crushing grip.
My bottom lip trembled violently. A scalding tear escaped my eye, carving a burning path down my pale cheek. Taking a small, broken step toward Robert, I raised my shaking hands, burying my fingers into the rigid, iron-like muscle of his broad forearm.
"Robert... please," I choked out, my voice cracking with suffocating terror: "Let him go first... I’ll explain everything to you!"
He didn’t even look down at my hands on his arm. Instead, he tilted his sharp jaw down toward me, wrapped in a blanket of horrifying detachment. He tightened his fist around Steve’s collar even further, cutting off Steve’s air until he gasped for breath.
"Explain what to me, Julie?..." Robert hissed softly, his breath brushing against my skin: "...Are you going to explain how your brother’s very-much-alive friend the one who offered you love suddenly turned into a corpse your brother offers me condolences for?!"
A horrifying silence stretched for a few brutal seconds.
Robert’s jaw set with ruthless precision. Suddenly, he shoved Steve backward. My brother stumbled against the wall, clutching his raw throat as he coughed violently.
Robert turned his entire body toward me. Closing the distance between us in a single dominant stride, he backed me against the wall, trapping me beneath his long shadow.
He reached out, his heavy hand clamping firmly around my left wrist. Turning my palm over slowly, he stared down at the brilliant emerald ring glistening on my ring finger. Then, lifting his gaze back to mine, a dark, mocking smirk curled his lips.
"You have one minute to tell me the absolute truth, Julie..." he purred, his voice dripping with lethal promises: "...Or I swear to God, I’ll find out my own way... and you will hate the result."
My entire body shivered. A searing chill ran through my fingertips, locked firmly inside his heavy palm. His pitch-black eyes savored my breakdown with dark satisfaction and criminal authority giving me one final chance before burning the entire world to the ground.
I dropped my gaze to his hand, which was squeezing my wrist with firm, controlled strength. Squeezing my eyes shut, I tried to force a single breath into my tight chest.
Steve glanced toward the hallway in visible panic, running a hand over his reddened throat as he tried to intervene with a shaky, stammering voice:
"Robert... it’s not what you think. Julie was just—"
"Shut the fuck up, Steve!"
Robert thundered without even turning his head. The glass in the windows vibrated with his roar. His icy eyes remained glued to my quivering pupils, tracking every micro-tremor of my lips with terrifying precision.
Swallowing down the bitter lump in my throat, tears streamed down my cheeks in scalding waves. My mind scrambled wildly, desperately clawing for a quick lie any lie that could pull me out of this trap.
Opening my trembling lips, I forced out a broken, pleading sob:
"Ethan... Ethan died in a horrific car accident two years ago, Robert! I swear to you, he’s dead! He doesn’t exist in this world anymore!"
Robert’s eyes narrowed into frozen, unreadable slits. He leaned his face down until his hot breath brushed the tip of my nose, asking in a low, deadly hiss:
"He died in a car accident? Then what the fuck makes your brother offer me condolences as if I stole his inheritance... or as if you belonged to him until the day he died?!"
(Oh, God... what a pathetic lie! How am I going to convince him now?! Think, Julie, think!)
I yanked my trapped left hand slightly against his grip, lifting my fingers to lay them over his hand on my wrist. The green emerald pressed directly against the skin of his wrist as I choked out in total, devastating heartbreak:
"Because he saw me as his fiancée in his own twisted mind! Because he stalked me and my brother for years, trying to force me to marry him! Steve hated him... he thought I would stay trapped by his memory or the trauma he caused us! I swear to you I never loved him... I swear on my life I’ve never loved any man in this world except you, Robert!"
Every muscle in his massive body locked rigid for several agonizing seconds.
A suffocating quiet filled the hallway, shattered only by the sound of my ragged breathing and the violent, irregular thuds of my heart against my ribs.
Robert’s jaw flexed hard. Slowly, his dark pupils locked onto mine, a cold, merciless smile spreading across his face.
"So..." he said softly, weighing every single word: "...He’s dead. That calls for relief, Steve... not condolences."
He turned his sharp profile slightly toward my brother, who stood tense and rigid by the archway, adding in a tone of absolute, royal finality:
"Dead or alive... Julie was never going to belong to anyone else in this world. Whether it was a car crash or a bullet to his fucking head... the result is the exact same."
The burning lump in my throat dissolved for a split second. I thought I had made it through that I had slipped past the razor-sharp claws of his suspicion. A weak sigh of relief escaped my bruised lips, my body relaxing slightly as I prayed the nightmare was over.
Targeting that brief moment of safety, the ice in Robert’s tone melted into the deceptive quiet before the storm. He uttered a strange, sudden request that dropped over me like a thunderbolt:
"Julie... can you get me a glass of milk?"
I froze in place. My eyes snapped up to his face in utter shock, entirely unable to process what he wanted at a time like this.
"What?..." I swallowed hard, my voice quivering: "...Milk?! Right now?"
He tilted his head, his piercing, cold gaze slicing right through me, as if tearing away the walls of my chest to read every electrical impulse in my nervous system. Leaning down, his massive frame loomed over me, his voice dripping with sharp, dangerous mockery:
"Don’t think I’m stupid, Julie!... I’m not an idiot who’s going to buy this pathetic performance... or believe your brother offered me condolences for some guy who just ’wished’ you were his fiancée!"
My knees gave out completely from absolute terror. My heart battered against my ribs with a violence that felt ready to rupture my chest. Hot tears cascaded down my cheeks. I raised my trembling hands, desperately trying to clutch at any final thread of hope, weeping in sheer panic:
"I... I’m telling you the truth, Robert!"
"Shut up!"
He roared right into my face. The sheer force of his voice cut the oxygen clean out of my lungs.
I went rigid, every drop of color draining completely from my face. In that horrific second, I knew with absolute certainty that every cardboard wall I had built had collapsed. The secret I had buried deep was clawing its way into the light, and there was no power left in this world to hide it any longer.
Robert took one final, dominant step forward, dropping his sharp face until his eyes trapped my very soul. He warned me in a low, dangerous purr that stopped my heart cold:
"Now you’re going to talk, Julie... and don’t you dare utter anything less than the absolute truth... I’m warning you."
A cold shiver locked down my spine. There was no escape left. No options. Just standing bare-chested before the gates of hell, forced to face the tragic truth no matter how brutally it burned.