Chapter 13
Sydney still had that weeping look on her face. Ernest used to find this side of her extremely pitiful and endearing, but now, he inexplicably found it annoying.
Brushing Sydney off, Ernest grabbed a cigarette, walked to the stairwell and dialed.
Ivana’s number.
“Beep
beep… beep…” just a busy signal.
She had even blocked his calls!
Ernest, gripping his phone tightly,
slammed it into the window frame o
of the
staircase. The phone screen shattered.
“Hey! All of you, get over here!” he shouted.
Thirteen minutes later, Dominic arrived. with a group of underlings. “Ugh, Ernest, we can’t reach her either,” Dominic bent
over in distress, his forehead soaked with
tiny beads of sweat.
The ashtray in front of Ernest was already
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packed with cigarette butts and the small apartment was filled with white smoke.
Sydney was coughing from the haze, tears streaming down her face while said, “Cough, cough… Ernest, it’s fine. Ivana might just be upset. Cough… girls are like this, they throw tantrums sometimes.”
By this point, Ernest wasn’t listening to anyone anymore, “Go back to your room and sleep.”
Sydney glanced at the bright daylight outside. It wasn’t even ten in the morning yet and he was telling her to go to bed. Biting her lip, she didn’t dare argue. Seeing Ernest’s unhinged state, she knew better, his violence was well–known.
Ernest roared, “Call her! Keep calling until you get through! Do whatever it takes!”
The air conditioning was running and it was only 24 degrees Celsius, yet Dominic and his crew had sweat–soaked shirts sticking to their backs.
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They said, “Ernest, we’ve called dozens of times already. Our phones are about to die. and we still can’t reach her.” Even Sydney had been forced to try calling a few times, with the same result.
Ernest insisted, “Go buy SIM cards! Buy phones! Keep calling!”
“But…” Dominic was about to refuse but Ernest’s cold, sharp gaze swept across them. Dominic swallowed nervously. There was no escape from this mess today.
Downstairs, Dominic and the others tried
to think of a solution, “Dominic, what
now?”
“How the hell should I know? That woman’s gone missing and now we’re stuck cleaning up this mess.” Dominic stubbed his cigarette out violently. “Let’s go! Find the head of the telecom company and tell them it’s for Ernest!”
Two hours later, piles of phones sat stacked like a mountain in front of Ernest. “Keep
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calling! All of you!” he commanded.
Dominic and his three underlings split the tasks, two people rotated on phone duty while another handled unpacking new SIM cards, inserting them and registering the
numbers.
They kept this up until nearly 2 PM, skipping lunch entirely. A mountain of SIM card boxes piled up and everyone’s phones were so overheated they were almost toot hot to hold.
“Track her! Search everywhere! Turn San Diego upside down if you have to, but find her!” By now, Ernest had completely lost.
his mind.
For as long as he could remember, it had always been him saying no to Ivana, never the other way around. How could Ivana refuse him? How dare she refuse him!
Ivana woke up to find her phone
completely unresponsive. Frowning, she fiddled with it, puzzled. It had been idle all
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night with over 50% battery, how could it have shut off automatically?
She dismissed it as a sign of aging, worn- out batteries. Plugging it in, the phone rebooted. Within minutes, a torrent of missed call notifications and SMS alerts flooded her screen.
The phone froze from the sheer volume. The number stopped at 462 missed calls. All from San Diego, U.S.
Ivana sighed. She had already predicted something like this would happen, but she hadn’t expected Ernest to react so soon and so recklessly.
There was no way she could block all these numbers individually, so she simply left them there and ignored it all.
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