Just a Wet Nurse, Just a Plaything? Everyone Wept After My Death - Chapter 66
Chapter 66
Crack!
The rawhide whip, soaked in salt water, sliced through the air and struck Shen Yingyue’s already mangled back once more.
“Urgh…”
Shen Yingyue bit down hard on the bloodstained edge of the punishment bench, a broken groan escaping her throat.
The clothes across her back had long since been shredded by the lash. Each strike tore away flecks of flesh and blood that mingled with the icy snowflakes, painting a gruesomely beautiful scene in the bitter winter night.
Did it hurt?
Of course it did.
The agony felt as though even her soul were being torn apart. Salt water seeped into her wounds, like countless ants gnawing at her very marrow.
And yet, Shen Yingyue felt that this physical torment could not compare to even a fraction of the pain from the wound in her heart.
She did not close her eyes.
Through the swirling snow, her bloodshot, swollen eyes remained fixed on the carved mahogany doors a short distance away.
Beyond them lay the warm pavilion.
Through the half-open lattice window, she could see the room ablaze with light, warm and cozy.
She watched Huo Xiao help Old Madam Huo into her seat. She watched Liu Ruyan attentively offer her hot tea. She watched the entire family gathered together. Despite the awkwardness left by the earlier commotion, they still maintained that false picture of a loving mother, devoted children, and domestic bliss.
Outside the window, however…
In this courtyard buried beneath ice and snow…
She, the so-called sinner, was being tortured while her daughter, barely over a year old, was being sent down an unknown road to certain death.
“Ha…”
Shen Yingyue suddenly laughed.
The sound was faint and laced with blood, at once eerie and desolate.
So this was Huo Xiao’s so-called “devotion.”
She remembered all the sweet words he had whispered to her in bed over the past few months.
He had said, “Yingyue, you’re the only woman I have in Yanzhou.”
He had said, “As long as you behave, I’ll keep you safe for the rest of your life.”
He had said, “If anyone dares bully you, I’ll stab them to death myself.”
How wonderful those promises had sounded.
Back then, despite her fear and resistance, had some small part of her not wavered for a fleeting moment? Had she not once been naive enough to believe that this great hero, who fought the enemy for his country, might truly become a shield for her and her child?
Reality had now slapped her hard across the face.
This man did indeed have a blade, and he had power.
But he would never dare point that blade at his mother, his family, or even that cousin of his whose every word was a lie.
He might be a hero on the battlefield, but within this man-eating inner residence, he was a coward through and through! A hypocrite who could not distinguish right from wrong and preserved his family’s precious “harmony” only by sacrificing the weak!
On one side of his scales were his mother’s whims, his family’s reputation, and his cousin’s “innocence.”
On the other were the dignity of a lowly wet nurse and the life of her daughter.
He had chosen the former without hesitation.
Worse, he believed he had been “merciful.”
After all, he had not killed her outright. He had merely sentenced her to twenty lashes. He had not fed Nuannuan directly to the wolves. He had merely cast her out and left her to fend for herself.
“What laughable… mercy.”
Shen Yingyue had no tears left to shed. In their place came a clarity and cold resolve unlike anything she had ever known.
Crack!
The twentieth lash fell.
Shen Yingyue suddenly coughed up a mouthful of black blood, and her consciousness began to fade.
In that final moment, she saw Huo Xiao by the window turn his head and glance outside, as if he had sensed something.
Their gazes met from afar, divided by the wind and snow and the paper-covered window.
A trace of conflicted pity and evasion flickered in Huo Xiao’s eyes.
But in Shen Yingyue’s eyes, there was only a frozen wasteland, silent and dead.
Her gaze held her utter loss of faith in him and a final resolve to sever all ties.
From this moment on, the Shen Yingyue who had nestled obediently in his arms and called him “General,” who had sought his protection whenever she was bullied, was dead.
She had died beneath those twenty lashes, in this tomb known as Huo Manor.
“The sentence has been carried out!”
The old woman administering the punishment put away the whip and cast a disgusted glance at the woman sprawled across the bench like a slab of mangled meat.
By now, Shen Yingyue was barely breathing. Her entire body was ice-cold, and blood mixed with melted snow pooled around her.
“Steward, what should we…?”
One of the servants looked uneasily at the steward beside him, then gestured toward the raging snowstorm outside.
“The snow is too heavy. The road to Xishan must already be blocked. And with this woman injured so badly, she’ll freeze stiff before we get halfway to the Xishan Family Temple.
“Today is the General’s birthday. It would be terribly inauspicious if she died on the way.”
The steward frowned. He glanced at the banquet still underway in the inner courtyard, then at the half-dead Shen Yingyue, his face full of distaste.
The servant had a point. If the woman died on her way to the family temple during such a celebration, it would reflect badly on the household.
“Fine. Consider her lucky.”
The steward spat on the ground and ordered coldly, “Drag her away for now and throw her into the woodshed in the back courtyard, the one where we keep all the junk.
“Don’t give her a blanket or any medicine. Leave her there to live or die on her own. If she survives the night, we’ll send her away tomorrow once the snow stops. If she doesn’t… wrap her in a straw mat tomorrow morning and dump her in the potter’s field!”
“Yes!”
Two burly servants stepped forward. Grabbing Shen Yingyue by the ankles, they hauled her roughly off the punishment bench as though dragging a dead dog.
Her body left a long, glaring trail of blood across the snow.
She neither struggled nor groaned, allowing the darkness to swallow her whole.
On that freezing winter night, she was abandoned in the darkest, dampest corner of the General’s Manor, accompanied only by the agony of her wounds and a hatred carved deep into her bones.
