Chapter 109 - 0109: I’ll Take Your Sister To Him Instead

Chapter 109: Chapter 0109: I’ll Take Your Sister To Him Instead

Elena’s Point Of View

It’s been weeks since that breakdown, and I’ve done everything to avoid Graham and his mistress. I just don’t trust myself to stay calm around them, so it’s easier to pretend they don’t exist.

No, that’s not fear. That’s me protecting what’s left of my sanity while quietly figuring out how to escape this marriage.

But Graham... Graham had changed. Not in the way I once prayed for. He hadn’t softened or apologized or even tried to look at me the way he used to. Instead, he had become... watchful. Possessive, almost. I noticed the shift first in the small things: the way his eyes followed me when I moved around the room, the way his phone stayed closer to him now, as if he was bracing for some invisible war.

Then came the men. Two of them. Dark suits. Unsmiling. They trailed me from the house to the company and back, like shadows tied to my heels.

I caught glimpses of them in reflections... storefront windows, the glossy hood of a parked car, always a careful distance behind, always present.

I confronted him once, my voice steadier than my pulse, because if there’s one thing Graham respects, it’s a composed fa?ade. "Why are they following me?" I asked, fingers gripping the edge of the dining table to keep them from shaking.

He didn’t even blink. "Security precautions," he said, casual, as if this were the most natural thing in the world.

Security precautions. Right.

I wanted to laugh. Or maybe scream. Graham had never once cared about my safety before, but suddenly he’s assigning bodyguards? I knew better than to believe him. Some part of me wondered if this was less about protecting me and more about controlling me, keeping me tethered where he could always find me.

But for now, I let it slide. As long as it didn’t interfere with my routine, I could afford to wait and watch, the way he seemed to be waiting and watching me.

If you think it’s simple... just leave, you’ve never stood where I stood. If it were only me, I would have walked long ago, without a single glance back. But it’s never been only me. My family is my ledger, my chain. My mother knows every weakness and she uses them like knives, sharpened over years of practice, aimed with precision.

The memory comes back like a slap: the smell of stale cooking oil, the thin light through the louvres, my little brother curled at the foot of the mattress, my sister clutching a ragged doll with one button eye missing. I was sixteen then, knees raw from kneeling over a pile of rice we didn’t have.

We’d gone two days without power; our single fan had stopped spinning hours ago, and the heat stuck to the back of my throat like syrup, thick and suffocating.

"Mama," I said, voice small as the room, "we’ll manage. I’ll..."

"Manage?" She cut me off with a laugh that had no humor in it, only something brittle and dangerous. Her face was twice the size of normal, red with a habit I’d learned to fear, the way her jaw clenched when she was pleased with the hurt she could make. "Manage? Do you know what pride does, Elena? Pride eats you. Pride gets your siblings starving while you think you’re a queen."

My sister, barely ten, stood up, eyes wet and wide with fear. "Mama, please, we can sell Auntie’s old radio..."

"Shut up!" my mother snapped at her. The word landed like a stone, and my sister flinched as though it had struck her physically.

I remember the way the room narrowed to just us... three small bodies and one thunder, one storm that never seemed to exhaust itself. She’d met a man at the market, a rich man’s cousin maybe, a man who’d offered more than words: land, money, a house that didn’t leak.

Her mouth had danced around the promise for days, turning it over like a coin she couldn’t decide whether to spend, and when she finally decided, the house shook with the weight of her decision.

"That man will take care of us," she said finally, as if pronouncing a spell, as if saying it aloud might make it truer. "He’ll take care of everything." She looked at me then, slow and sure, as if weighing the worth of a thing on some invisible scale. "And he wants a wife. You’re the eldest. It’s your duty."

"Mom." I remember the way my knees buckled, how the word came out thick, choked by something rising in my throat. "He’s old. He’s..."

"...a man with means," she finished for me, venom lacing itself around a promise. "He is the solution, Elena. Not chatter." She flicked the back of her hand at my mouth like brushing a fly away, dismissing me as easily as an inconvenience.

"No." I sounded brave and hollow all at once, my voice betraying the fear churning beneath it. "I can’t. I won’t marry someone I don’t love. I can’t give myself like I’m selling yams at the market."

Her eyes sharpened then, a thing transformed, something in her hardening past the point of reason. "You will do as I say," she said, and the sentence had no room for negotiation, no crack through which mercy might slip.

My brother started to cry; my sister clung to my leg, her small fingers digging into my skin. "Please," she begged, "please don’t make her..."

"Silence!" My mother’s voice rose and then turned into the thing I still hear at night: a steady, legal sentence, delivered as though she were a judge and I the accused. She grabbed a kitchen broom, the old one with the frayed end, and swung.

The first strike missed me... a warning, cutting the air with loud anger. The second landed across my shoulder, sting and hot, blooming instantly into a bruise I would feel for weeks.

I staggered because I couldn’t believe what was happening, because the pain made everything sharper and more real, dragging me fully into a moment I wanted desperately to escape.

"Don’t!" I pushed myself between her and the kids before I even had time to think, my body moving faster than my fear. "Don’t touch them!"

Her hand came down again, this time across my cheek... a slap that planted blinding stars behind my eyes. I tasted metal, copper and warm, spreading across my tongue. My sister’s small hands reached for me, fingers clumsy, trying to hold me steady even as she trembled violently. "Mama, stop! Stop it!"

She shoved my sister away as if the child were a nuisance, an obstacle in her path. "You think I don’t know what’s best?" she hissed. Her face was not my mother’s then; it belonged to someone else entirely, someone taking everything she could get and calling it necessity. "You will do this for us. You will do this or you will watch this family rot!"

I remember knuckles on the floor, my palms scraped rough as I braced myself against the ground. Each strike sent a different echo through the room: anger, betrayal, the thin terrifying knowledge that the person who made you was also the one who’d choose to break you for what she called survival, as though love and cruelty could share the same hands.

"Please," I said again, voice breaking apart at the edges. "There must be another way. Let me find work, let me..."

"Work?" She spat the word as if it were a curse, something filthy she needed to expel from her mouth. "You think a girl like you will find work that feeds three mouths? You think you are better than what you are?"

She leaned into me, breath hot with the smell of old tobacco, and I felt the weight of her disappointment as if it were a physical thing pressing down on my chest, crushing the air from my lungs. "Look at you! You’re nothing! You’re an empty, useless mouth!"

My sister sobbed, her small body wracked with the effort of it. My brother clung to the hem of his blanket and whispered, "Elena, don’t let them take you," his voice barely audible over his own tears.

"How can you even say that?" I whispered back to him, though the question was as much for myself as for him. I wanted to promise him everything... that I would not let them take me, that I would find a way, that the world outside this kitchen held some kindness I hadn’t yet found, but promises in that kitchen were fragile things, easily shattered.

My mother’s hand closed around my arm so tight the skin bruised instantly, her fingers like a vice. She shoved me hard; I stumbled and my forehead slammed into the wall with a crack that rang in my skull, a sound I felt more than heard.

Stars bloomed, bright and terrible. For a second there was only the taste of metal and the bright white spike behind my eyes, the world reduced to pain and nothing else.

When I blinked through the haze, I saw her... my mother raising her hand toward my sister. The sight of her about to strike sent something cold through me, a jolt that overrode every ounce of pain in my body. My lungs filled and I dragged myself up on shaking knees, crawling, because I could not, would not let her touch them, not while I still drew breath.

"Mom!" I screamed, raw and animal-like, a sound I didn’t recognize as my own. I threw myself between my siblings and her like I was made of fight, like there was nothing left of me but the will to shield them. "That man is thrice your age!"

My mother narrowed her eyes, slow and terrible, something calculating moving behind them. For a breath she seemed to weigh the world, to measure her children against her wants. Then she shrugged, almost casual, as if she were naming the weather instead of bartering her daughter’s life. "But he can afford the bills," she said, like money is a spell that erases everything, that could wash clean any sin.

"I won’t," I said, quieter at first, then louder, because the words had to hold, had to mean something even as my body shook. "I won’t marry him!"

Her face shifted... not sorrow, not anger, something practiced and final, a mask she’d worn before and would wear again. She moved like someone closing a door on a room she never intended to enter again.

Then her hand came up and slapped me so hard my cheek stung and my head spun, the world tilting sideways for a moment. Pain uncoiled through me, hot and immediate, spreading like fire through dry grass.

Between strikes, the words tumbled out of me before I could stop them, fueled by something reckless and desperate. "Since he’s so perfect, so rich, why don’t you marry him yourself?" I shouted, the taste of blood thick in my mouth. "You want money that badly? Go on, be with him! Or are you scared he wouldn’t even look at you? Afraid I might refuse and take my siblings away? Go marry him, Mom, no one’s stopping you!"

Her face went crimson, her eyes flashing with something between rage and disbelief, as though I had struck her instead of the other way around. "You evil, ungrateful child!" she spat.

Then the beating intensified. Each blow landed harder than the last. The wooden handle of the broom cracked against my ribs, my arms, my back, sending sharp, agonizing waves of fire through my body.

I did my best to shield my siblings with my body, curling them into my arms, burying their faces against my chest as if I could make myself a human wall, absorbing every strike meant to reach them.

"You’re just as useless as your father!" she screamed between strikes, her voice hoarse and demonic, barely recognizable as the voice that had once sung me to sleep. "A lazy, good-for-nothing disappointment! I gave birth to a curse!"

My sister wailed, her tiny body trembling violently against mine; my brother begged for it to stop, screaming until his voice gave out entirely, reduced to hoarse, broken sobs. I remember the wet sound of my palm on the floor when I steadied myself, the scrape of skin against rough wood, and I braced, taking every single blow because my broken body was cheaper than their futures, because I would rather bleed than let either of them carry these scars.

Finally, she stopped, panting heavily, the cracked broom dangling from her hand like a weapon spent of its purpose. She tossed it aside like trash, staring down at me as I lay crumpled over my sobbing siblings, gasping for air, blood dripping from my split lip onto the floor in slow, deliberate drops.

She leaned down, her face inches from mine, her voice dropping into a low, terrifyingly flat whisper... each sentence another lock snapping shut forever, sealing away whatever tenderness might once have existed between us.

"You will do this for your family," she said, her eyes dead and cold as stone, devoid of anything I might have once called love. "You have three days. Three days to think about it and accept his proposal. If you refuse..."

She slowly turned her gaze toward my ten-year-old sister, who was shivering in my arms, her tear-stained face pale with terror. My mother reached out, dragging her thumb callously across my sister’s jawline, the gesture almost tender if not for the threat behind it.

"...if you refuse, Elena, I will take your sister to him instead. He likes them young anyway. He’ll take her in your place, and I will sign the papers myself."

The world stopped. The air left my lungs completely, a horrifying, icy shock paralyzing every nerve in my body, freezing me in place as though the threat itself had turned me to stone.

"No..." I choked out, a soundless, shattered gasp tearing from my bleeding throat. "No, Mom... please... not her... take me... take me..."

My mother stood up, smoothing her skirt as though she’d merely spilled tea rather than shattered her daughter’s future, looking down at my broken form with utter indifference. "Three days, Elena. Choose."