The blonde couldn't believe the thought that came to her mind, but that was the only thing she could think of, the only reason she could see as the justification of her phantom pain.
She hurriedly took out her phone, and went on to open the browser to launch a search with two words, or rather, with one name: "Alex Lenner."
And she got instant results, with a glaring one at the top:
"Alex Lenner, the rumored main heir of Arland Group, saved a little girl from being crushed by a reckless van today."
The blues eyes narrowed in the dim environment. The scene from one month ago, on the night they met replayed in her mind, especially when Alex dropped his casual facade. The intensity he showed at that time was something she would never forget.
She opened the article and read it. It spoke of an accident which happened earlier in the day which almost caused the death of a little girl who had ran into an intersection after losing the supervision of her mother. She almost got crushed by a driver who was recklessly trying to run a red light with a loaded van, only for Alex Lenner to intervene and put himself between the girl and the van.
By putting himself at risk, and sacrificing a million dollars Alfa Romeo luxurious sports car, he saved the little girl, and prevented a tragedy from happening.
To say the blonde was astonished would be an understatement. Even ignoring whether she held any kind of prejudice against the rich playboy for whom money seemed to only be a number, she never saw him as someone who would go that far for other people.
The reporter who wrote the article even managed to get a video to attach to it.
Opening the video file, it started with a little girl running onto the road, her focus on something on the other side, or anyway, not on her immediate surroundings. Still, she should have been safe, and she should have managed to reach the other side of the empty intersection, but the road on her right had a car barreling down the way like a devil running loose from hell, and as things stood, a bloody tragedy was not far from occurring.
Even though it was just a video of what happened hours ago, the tension from the situation was passed on to the blonde, making her unable to stop herself from tightening her grip on the phone, and forget the pain she was dealing with.
Right then, the red Alfa Romeo gleaming under the midday sun moved like a bat out of hell. It moved around the same time as when the little girl was about to reach the middle of the intersection she was crossing diagonally, putting herself in a straight line with the van.
The sports car moved like a lightning. It traced a bright red line and skidded to a stop with the door on the driver's side already open.
Had it remained fast, not mention whether the girl could have been saved, even if she had been, the transmission of kinetic energy through the contact with the driver in the speeding car would have given her serious injuries like broken ribcage, collapsed lungs, torn organs and internal bleeding, and most probably death, from being too young to support a system so torn and broken.
The dexterity of the driver could be seen from how he stopped the car going at full throttle just when he should. And it might be the adrenaline, but he managed to adroitly pick up the frozen little girl, and protect her when the impact came from the right.
Even with the sound of the accident unclear from the recording devices being too far away, the impact made the blonde's teeth ache just fine.
Her heart pounded at the spinning sports car until it stopped with a softer shock against the attenuators in the middle of the road, and the little girl was taken out, and embraced by her traumatized mother who had even lost her shoes somewhere at some point.
It was then that the blonde exhaled the breath she had been holding, and noticed the sweat that suddenly made her clothes wet. She breathed, and watched Alex get out of the luxury car now in the need of heavy repairs, and lean against it.
His smile, she remarked, was different at that moment as he looked at the mother and daughter. But when she noticed the left side he cradled with his hand as he let his weight rest not on his backbone, but on the car, her eyes flashed, at the same time as her mind which suddenly recalled why she had been reading the article before she lost herself watching the attached video.
The explosion that had been suppressed in her mind suddenly returned even stronger. Her breath hitched, and she froze.
She swallowed hard, and dived in the memory she had been trying to avoid. The paper, white, palm-sized, and a little hard. The red string on top, tied into a knot, a knot maybe created when she opened the wooden box she had been there to snatch that night a month ago.
Her hand trembled, as she recalled the slight resistance when opening the box at that time. She recalled the words she had read on the white paper when she had woken up on the floor that night.
Nausea suddenly assaulted her. But thinking about something, she hurried to scroll the article upward to look at the time Alex Lenner's heroic moment was said to have taken place, and when she saw it, it all exploded.
Her eyes narrowed, her body secreted adrenaline, her stomach churned, her heart clenched, then unclenched, and started pounding.
The nausea didn't only come from one place anymore. Her whole body screamed for her to throw up at that moment.
She stood up and ran back to the bathroom, then bent over the sink.
"Hurgh~!"
It took a while, and it was mostly her dry heaving after she had vomited what she ate just earlier.
She breathed heavily, her chest rising and falling as she looked at herself in the mirror. In her mouth, beyond the taste of what she just ate then threw up, there was a more prominent taste, one acidic or metallic. It was difficult to say, but her dilated pupils told her… that it was fear, it was dread.
It was only her and her reflection in the mirror. It was only the silence of the night in the ward and her breathing that she was forcing to calm down, until she was startled by a vibration from her hand, then a ringtone.
*Ring* *Ring* *Ring*
She looked down at the lit up screen, and she recognized the number that had started what she was now finding out to be a nightmare.
*Ring* *Ring* *Ring*
The insistent ringing seemed to spread the impatience of the caller in the small bathroom, and the blonde finally made her choice.
*Beep*
She picked up the call.