Chapter 528:

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The flight duration was over two hours. I felt restless and disturbed throughout the flight.

When I boarded the plane, I wished I could fly to Derek right away, but when the plane landed, I was suddenly overcome with fear.

When we landed in Sousen, it started to rain. God knew exactly how I felt. To my surprise, Timmy picked us up.

When I saw him, I felt a spark of hope ignite in me.

“How’s Derek?”

Timmy drove the car calmly. After a momentary silence, he replied, “Brace yourself. He’s not well.” My heart fluttered with worry.

Timmy drove straight to the Sousen Military Hospital. The atmosphere was one of palpable seriousness. There was also an air of depression.

Timmy drove ahead. I followed close behind him, and Alvaro too, as he held the two children in his arms.

After climbing the stairs, we walked down a long hallway. As we went on, I felt more and more uneasy. After turning a corner, several men in police uniforms were visible at the end of the hallway.

Timmy approached and spoke to them. They glanced at me from time to time.

After a while, Timmy came over, pointed to a room and said to me, “He’s in that room.” I almost started shaking.

I staggered and plucked up the courage to look out the window. At a glance, I saw a person lying on the bed with several tubes all over his body. I put my hands on the glass and immediately tears came to my eyes. There was a small group of doctors around the bed. They seemed to be discussing something for a while, but then shook their heads. I watched as they removed and put away, one after the other, the various instruments placed on Derek’s body. Then they covered him with a white cloth.

“No!” I exclaimed.

I wanted to run inside, but a policeman standing at the door stopped me in my tracks.

“I’m sorry, but you can’t come in.”

The doctors bowed to the bed and left the room, one after the other. I grabbed onto one doctor’s arm and screamed in heartbreaking anguish, “Doctors, why don’t you save him? Please don’t give up on him.”

The doctor shook his head in resignation.

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“I’m sorry. We did everything we could to save him for five hours. In fact, his heart had stopped beating for a long time and we still tried our best to save him.”

I stood for a moment looking at the doctors and the policemen.

“I refuse to believe it. He called me early this morning. Now you’re telling me that his heart had stopped beating a long time ago?” One of the policemen turned to me.

“Are you Eveline?” I looked at him with tears in my eyes and nodded.

He pulled a bag out of his backpack and handed it to me.

“He asked me to give this to you when we attended to him at the accident scene,” he explained.

With trembling hands, I took the bag from him and emptied its contents into my hand. As I watched the items fall, tears rolled down my cheeks. It was a bunch of keys to the villa, and the bullet I used to wear around my neck. There was also a ring hanging like a pendant from the chain. It was the diamond ring I had seen but he had not given me.

The diamond ring was stained with a splatter of blood. It could only be his blood. As I thought about the last call he made to me, I realized that he must have exhausted all his strength to tell me ‘I love you’. When I imagined the scene of Derek asking the man to give me these things, I felt so miserable and overwhelmed with grief.

Holding the things tightly in my hand, I slowly squatted down on the floor and burst into uncontrollable tears.

What kind of pain was this? I felt completely dead inside.

The policemen, the doctors, Timmy and Alvaro, no one tried to convince me not to cry. In the face of death, words have no power. After crying inconsolably, I slowly stood up and looked at the person lying silently in the room.

I said firmly, “I want to take him home.”

The policeman stopped me again. “He is a martyr. He has sacrificed his life for the country. You can’t take him away. Besides, according to Derek Sullivan’s information, he is unmarried and has no family.”

I was stunned. Derek sacrificed his life for the country? Sacrifice? He was a martyr?

“And you can’t come to his funeral. I’m sorry, but it’s for your own protection.”

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