Elisa reached out, gently touching the burnt fur of the ragdoll cat, tears streaming down her face, unstoppable. Her misty eyes were filled with tears, stinging, as if they were going to blind her. She tilted her head back, veins bulging in her neck. Elisa half opened her mouth, tightly closed her eyes, her voice hoarse and strained.
Her choked and hoarse voice had already cracked, sounding like a rusty knife being sharpened against a stone, piercing and unpleasant, tugging at the heartstrings of anyone who heard it.
Louis’s eyes were also red. He silently turned his face away, not wanting to show any sign of weakness, afraid that he wouldn’t be able to stand in front of Elisa.
Elisa knelt on the ground, slowly sprinkling dirt over Mimi until it was buried, her emaciated body trembling violently, her fragmented crying growing louder, reaching the peak of sadness.
Elisa had never imagined that she could be so heartbroken. It felt as if her whole body was being pricked all over by countless needles, each one more vicious than the last, piercing her flesh, almost reaching her bone marrow, tormenting every inch of her body, leaving her unable to breathe.
Elisa scattered sunflower seeds in the flowerpot.
“If there is really reincarnation in this world, and everything can be reborn after death, then… Mimi, could we meet again?” Elisa’s eyes had always been dark, with a hint of light in her pupils, and now that glimmer had vanished, leaving her eyes like a pool of stagnant water.
Louis gently placed his hand on Elisa’s head, “There will be a next life, Mimi has only gone to the cat planet temporarily, it will definitely come back to you again.”
Elisa wiped her nose, her whole body covered in blood, her face dirty, her misty gray eyes.
Standing beside the tall man, Louis, she looked even thinner, as if she would disappear in the wind.
Elisa clenched the collar in her hand. “Let’s go.”
“Where to?” Louis asked, worried about Elisa. One moment ago, she was crying hoarsely, and now she had regained her composure, so calm that it was somewhat frightening.
Her face was pale, sickly, unlike a living person. With lifeless eyes and an expressionless face, she seemed like a puppet.
Elisa murmured, “Home,” and took a few steps before suddenly stopping. Her left hand was grabbed by someone, and she stiffly turned to look at Louis’s face.
Louis held her hand tightly, trembling with fear that something might happen to her. He stared at her intently, without blinking, as if he were not looking at a person but at a wisp of elusive smoke, afraid that she might vanish from his sight if he wasn’t careful.
“Elisa, come home with me,” Louis said.
Elisa didn’t say anything, but as Louis held her hand and walked forward, she involuntarily followed his steps.
Her eyes, which had been crying for too long, stung when they were exposed to the light outside. She half-closed her eyes to adjust for a while before opening them again.
Elisa glanced up at Louis’s tall figure.
Elisa didn’t say a word along the way. She had turned her phone to silent and had received numerous calls and messages.
Louis opened the passenger door and, after Elisa got in, he turned and sat in the driver’s seat, fastening her seatbelt.
As Louis drove, the inside of the car was quiet, and the sound of the wheels rolling over the road was clearly audible.
Louis handed Elisa a bottle of water. “Have some water.”
“I don’t want to,” Elisa said, feeling around the collar in her hand and taking out a small object the size of her pinky finger.
Louis glanced at it and instantly knew what it was.
A camera.
The camera was wrapped in the collar and was not easy to spot without careful inspection. Louis had only installed a locator in the collar, so the camera was installed by Elisa.
They had taken precautions, but Mimi still lost her life.
Elisa held the camera, which was also stained with blood, her hands trembling.
When they arrived at Louis’s house, he brought a clean set of clothes for Elisa. “You go take a shower first, I’ll check if the camera’s contents are intact.”
Elisa’s lowered eyelashes trembled slightly. After a long pause, she reached out and took the clothes from Louis’s hands, saying, “Thank you.”
Their relationship seemed to have returned to the beginning, seemingly close but actually distant.
After watching Elisa enter the bathroom, Louis looked at the camera placed on the table next to the collar. He took out his computer, inserted the memory card from the camera, and openedthe footage on the computer. The video was shaky, but still viewable. Louis fast-forwarded to today’s date, then rewound slowly.
He saw Iris carrying Mimi to a small riverbank and handing her over to a masked woman. Louis paused the video, cut and copied the footage of the next thirty minutes, and saved it to his USB drive.
He couldn’t let Elisa do something foolish, or dirty her hands, so he had to resolve the matter before she did.
In this world, abusing cats might not be illegal, at most, it would incur some moral condemnation.
Louis continued to watch the video, and when the woman took off her mask, Louis’s gaze narrowed.
It was Filippa.
A surge of cold anger covered Louis’s eyes, and he clenched the mouse, analyzing the situation carefully.
The true mastermind behind this was Lorelei, and Filippa was an accomplice used by her.
Lorelei had first arranged for someone to capture Iris’s mother, threatening Iris and forcing her to take Mimi and hand her over to Filippa.
Unable to harm Elisa directly, Filippa directed her hatred towards Mimi, simply because she felt that she had been shut out because of Elisa.
She could act so recklessly for a few reasons: her reputation was already tarnished, she believed that Lorelei could cover up the situation, and she was exploiting legal loopholes.
Louis thought that when Filippa was abusing Mimi, she probably believed that killing a cat wouldn’t be breaking any laws.
Since Filippa enjoyed exploiting legal loopholes, he would let her have what she wanted.
This time, Louis didn’t want to go through intermediaries. He went directly to his own Twitter account and posted the video.
In just ten seconds, the post had already garnered thousands of likes. He rarely used his Twitter for personal matters, usually for promotional purposes, but even so, he had a large number of followers.
By using his own Twitter account, he could make something trend without spending money, and it would go straight to the top of the trending list.
Louis saw the trending topic and hurriedly traced its location to find Elisa. He hadn’t read the content on Twitter, but he knew it couldn’t be anything good.
Now, a picture of him taking Elisa away from the hospital had been posted online. The social media influencers didn’t dare to offend Louis, so they resorted to smearing Elisa in an attempt to attract Louis’s fans’ attention.
These unscrupulous influencers were used to bullying the weak, thinking that Louis didn’t often use Twitter, so they could freely target those around him.
These scoundrels should have been dealt with long ago. Louis immediately contacted people to have these influencers banned, and he also traced their real identities and sent them legal notices.
As for what the netizens had posted, Louis didn’t have time to look at it, nor did he want to, because if he saw Elisa being mistreated because of him, he might not be able to stop himself from doing something regretful.
After dealing with everything, Louis checked the time and realized that half an hour had passed.
His heart skipped a beat. He stood up and looked upstairs. Elisa had been in the shower for so long, could it be…
Louis rushed upstairs, and when he reached the bathroom, he pressed the door handle, but it was locked from the inside. His heart raced in panic, and he quickly knocked on the door. “Elisa!”
There was no response from inside.
Louis’s breath caught, and he raised his foot to kick the door, when suddenly, there was a slight movement from inside, and the door handle turned.
Elisa, with her hair disheveled, pushed the door open. “What’s the matter?”
Louis breathed a sigh of relief, feeling as if his soul had momentarily left his body and returned. His mind went numb for a moment, and it took him a while to recover.
“I’ve retrieved the video.”
After taking a shower, logically, when Elisa came out, her body should still be steaming, and her face should have regained its color. But Elisa’s face remained pale, and although there was water in the bathroom, there was no sign of steam. Additionally, Elisa was right in front of him, and he could distinctly feel the chill emanating from her, not just from her body but also from her eyes. Elisa had taken a half-hour cold shower as a way to punish herself and to calm down.
“Who is it?” Elisa asked coldly.
“Filippa,” came the reply.
Elisa gritted her teeth, her gaze growing colder.
“I won’t let her get away with this.”
“Mmm,” this time, Louis didn’t stop her, because he had already done what he could. He couldn’t let go of Mimi’s death either. Both he and Elisa wanted the same thing: for Filippa to pay a painful price. However, Elisa’s resentment ran even deeper. In the car, when she said she wanted to kill “them,” she truly meant she wanted to use a knife on someone.
Elisa went downstairs and used Louis’s computer to open the video. When she saw the extent of Mimi’s injuries, she had wondered what it had been through, but nothing she had imagined came close to what had actually happened. Mimi was a delicate and pretty ragdoll cat. It was afraid of pain, and after the fire three years ago, it was even more afraid of fire. Yet, Filippa had poured gasoline directly onto it and set it on fire from its tail all the way up. In the video, Filippa looked sinister, her eyes filled with malice.
“Serves you right, Elisa. It’s all because of Elisa! If it weren’t for Elisa, I wouldn’t have turned out like this! You ugly cat deserved to die. Hate Elisa if you want to hate someone!” Filippa had clearly mistaken Mimi for Elisa.
Mimi gradually stopped struggling on the ground, lying still as the fire spread over its entire body. No one knew how it had managed to endure until the end. Apparently, Filippa didn’t want it to die so easily. She used her foot to extinguish the fire, a twisted smile on her face, like a maniac.
The surveillance camera focused on Mimi, making it impossible to see its condition. As Elisa watched the video, she couldn’t help but imagine what Mimi had gone through. It lay in a garbage dump, a grotesque mass of flesh and blood, its horrifically decayed wounds exposed to the air, a truly terrifying sight.
Elisa closed her stinging eyes. “How desperate must Mimi have been? How much strength did it take for her to hold on until Elisa found her?”
“Don’t watch it,” Louis spoke up.
“I want her to suffer a miserable death. She doesn’t deserve an easy way out.”
“I’ve already posted this video online,” Louis said.
Elisa looked at him.
“Now everyone knows what happened,” Louis added.
“So what?” Elisa sneered, full of sarcasm. Having taken a cold shower, she had become even more disgusted with this fake world. In this world, only murder receives retribution, not the killing of a cat. Even if everyone knew about Filippa’s crimes, at most they would just verbally insult her. For someone like her, online shaming was utterly useless, as she was more disgusting than any “online mob”.
“Elisa, I know you hate her, but I don’t want you to dirty your hands because of her.”
Elisa remained silent, just reopening the video to watch it again, seemingly wanting to engrain this hatred into her very marrow, deeply into her soul.
Louis directly closed the computer, knelt down, and grasped Elisa’s icy hand, looking into her eyes as he repeated, “Don’t face this alone. What you hate, what disgusts you, let me help you deal with it. Don’t dirty your hands for these scum, it’s not worth it.”