Chapter 116 - 0116: Enough Of This Pathetic Drama

Chapter 116: Chapter 0116: Enough Of This Pathetic Drama

Elena’s Point Of View

Three days later, the rusty iron lock clanged open with a sharp, deafening strike that jolted me straight out of a feverish half-dream.

In that dream, my father’s hands had been warm. He had been kneeling beside me, brushing the hair from my sticky forehead, whispering, "Hold on, my little girl. Just hold on a little longer." His voice had carried that same gentle rasp I remembered from childhood, the one that used to chase away nightmares and fevers alike.

I had reached for him in the dream, desperate to hold on to the warmth of his palm, but my fingers had closed around nothing but stale, cellar air. The loss of him, even in sleep, cut as fresh as the day we buried him.

The cold reality was an iron hand clamping into the collar of my torn shirt, yanking me upward without an ounce of mercy.

"Get up, dead weight," a voice growled over me.

My body violently protested. My knees buckled beneath me, my bare, dirt-encrusted feet scraping uselessly against the concrete floor as two men hauled me out of the stench of the cellar and dragged me into the blinding morning light of the yard.

The sudden brightness stabbed into my eyes like needles, and for a moment I could see nothing at all, only white fire and the outline of shapes swimming before me.

Somewhere beneath the pain, a distant part of me registered the absurdity of it... that after three days in darkness, even sunlight could feel like an assault.

My mother was already standing there, waiting.

She wore a fresh headscarf, her hands folded neatly over her stomach, her posture poised like a wealthy matriarch inspecting livestock. Her dark eyes were as cold and sharp as broken glass as she watched me stumble and collapse at her feet, panting like a dying animal.

I remembered, absurdly, a time when those same eyes had softened over a bowl of soup she once spooned into my mouth when I was small and feverish. She had hummed some old lullaby then, one I could no longer recall the words to.

That woman felt like a stranger now, buried somewhere beneath this one, and I wondered if she had ever truly existed at all, or if I had simply invented her out of a child’s desperate need to be loved.

"I hope you’ve learned your lesson?" she asked, her voice smooth and terrifyingly pleasant, yet edged like a freshly sharpened blade against my throat.

She stepped closer, the hard plastic of her shoe nudging my bruised shoulder. "Look at me when I talk to you, Elena. Did three days in the dark finally clear your stupid, stubborn head?"

I squeezed my eyes shut as a dry heave shook my chest. My throat was a cracked, bleeding desert. I couldn’t even shape words; if I tried to speak, I knew I would only cough up more blood. Slowly, agonizingly, I bowed my head and nodded once.

Some small, buried part of me screamed in protest at the submission, some fragment that still remembered what it felt like to stand tall and unafraid, but my body no longer belonged to that defiant part of my mind. It belonged only to survival.

Her lips curled into a slow, victorious smirk. She turned to the men, tsking under her breath. "Good. See? A little starvation works wonders on a rebellious bitch. They’ll be taking you to him soon. Go and bathe... you stink like rot."

I nodded again, silently, my whole body trembling like a dry leaf caught in a gale.

"Drag her to the washroom," my mother commanded, waving her hand with absolute revulsion. "Make sure she scrubs that filthy skin. I won’t have the buyer thinking I’m handing over damaged goods."

They shoved me toward the small, detached outdoor bathroom, the wooden door slamming shut behind me. I stumbled, my hands catching the edge of the cracked porcelain basin to keep from falling.

The cracked mirror hanging on the moss-covered wall showed a ghost.

I barely recognized the girl staring back. My eyes were sunken and hollow, surrounded by dark, violet shadows. My left cheek was swollen purple-blue, my lip split and caked with dried crimson. My chest was a map of dark, horrific bruises from her boots and theirs.

I searched that reflection for some trace of the girl I used to be... the one who laughed freely, who braided Heather’s hair on lazy Sunday afternoons, who had once believed the world was fundamentally kind, but she was gone, replaced by this hollow, broken stranger.

I pressed my fingertips to the glass, half expecting the reflection to move independently of me, as though we were no longer the same person at all.

My hands shook uncontrollably as I reached out and turned the brass tap. The rusted pipe groaned, sputtering brown dirt at first, before a weak, ice-cold stream of water began to flow.

I pressed my trembling palms into the water, splashing it onto my burning face. The sharp shock of the cold sent a gasp tearing through my raw throat, and for a moment, I just leaned over the basin, weeping silently as the water trickled over my skin, mixing with tears I could no longer tell apart from the wetness on my cheeks.

I grabbed a scrap of rough soap and began to scrub. I scrubbed fiercely at the blood crusted on my jaw, at the caked dirt under my fingernails, at the deep, dark bruises that wouldn’t wash away no matter how hard I scraped until my skin was raw and bleeding. The water swirled brown and red at my feet, carrying pieces of my agony down the drain.

My ragged, pathetic sobs filled the tiny room, echoing off the damp tiles until I bit down hard on my own knuckles, tasting copper, just to silence myself. I thought of Heather’s small hands and Dave’s frightened eyes, and I forced myself to keep scrubbing, to keep breathing, because collapsing now would help no one.

They needed me whole, or at least standing, and that thought alone kept my arms moving long after my strength had abandoned me.

When I finally stepped out, damp, shivering, and stripped down to my bare soul, my mother was standing right outside the door, waiting with a plastic-wrapped bundle in her hands.

She didn’t hand it to me. She tossed it casually into my wet chest.

"Wear this," she snapped. "And be quick about it. The transport is here."

My shaking fingers tore open the plastic, and the moment I unfolded the fabric, my stomach dropped into a bottomless abyss.

It was a thin, cheap, horribly revealing dress. Jet black, sheer, clinging, and far too small. The neckline plummeted down to the ribs, the hem barely reaching my mid-thigh. It wasn’t clothing meant to keep a person warm or covered... it was a wrapper designed purely to display merchandise, to advertise a young girl’s body to an old man’s appetite. My hands trembled as I held it, as though the fabric itself might burn me.

A surge of pure humiliation burned through my veins. "I... I can’t wear this..." I choked out, my voice cracking into a dry whisper. "Mother, please... it’s transparent... I can’t..."

Her sharp gaze cut me off like a scythe through dry grass. Before I could step back, her hand shot out, her nails digging into the soft skin of my neck, squeezing tight enough to stop my breath.

"You will wear what I tell you to wear!" she hissed directly into my face, her breath smelling of hot tea and bitter gall. "You think you have dignity left, Elena?! You lost your dignity the moment you tried to steal my children away from me! Put it on before I have these men strip you and put it on you themselves!"

She shoved me back hard. Shame... heavy, suffocating, crushing shame, flooded every inch of my being as my hands shook violently, forcing the thin, tight fabric over my bruised hips. The dress clung to my shivering frame like a cruel mockery.

My skin crawled, feeling completely violated before anyone had even laid a finger on me. I wrapped my arms around myself, trying uselessly to hide beneath fabric that hid nothing at all. For one wild, irrational moment, I wished the earth would simply open beneath me and swallow me whole.

"Elena..."

A tiny, shattered voice broke the heavy silence of the yard.

I whirled around. Standing near the back shed, held firmly by the wrists by two guards, was Heather. Dave was beside her, his face pale, his eyes swollen shut from days of crying in the dark. Seeing them like that... diminished, terrified, clinging to each other for whatever comfort they could find, broke something inside me far deeper than any bruise ever could.

They looked so much smaller than I remembered, as though the last three days had shrunk them down to nothing.

Heather’s large, brown eyes were brimming with tears as she stared at me in that dreadful, tiny black dress. She broke free from the guard’s light grip and ran toward me, her tiny hands clutching tightly at my damp fingers.

"Elena..." she wept, her voice cracking into a million pieces. "What are they doing to you? Why are you wearing that? You don’t have to go with them... please, don’t leave us!"

The sob rose in my chest so fast and hard I almost choked on it. I dropped straight to my knees on the gravel, completely ignoring the sharp pain in my legs, and dragged both Heather and Dave into my arms.

I pulled them against me with every ounce of remaining strength in my broken body, clutching them so tight I felt their tiny hearts hammering like trapped birds against my ribs. I wanted to fuse us together. I wanted to swallow them whole into my chest so no one could ever touch them again.

I memorized the smell of Heather’s hair, the way Dave’s small fingers gripped my sleeve, because some desperate part of me feared this might be the last time I ever held them. In that fleeting, fractured moment, I would have traded every remaining year of my life just to guarantee them one more day of safety.

My tears poured freely, soaking into Heather’s dirty hair and Dave’s small shoulders.

"I’ll be back, guys," I wept into their necks, my whisper trembling violently against their skin. "I swear to you... I’ll be back for you... trust me... please, trust me..."

"Promise?" Heather sobbed, her tiny hands digging into the thin fabric over my back. "Elena, promise me you won’t let the bad man keep you! Promise me you’ll come back!"

I pulled back just enough to look into her tear-streaked, terrified face. My throat burned like liquid fire, but I forced the words out through my bleeding lips. "I promise... I promise on Papa’s memory, Heather... I will come back for you both."

YANK.

A heavy, brutal hand clamped onto my shoulder, tearing me violently away from them.

"Enough of this pathetic drama!" my mother’s voice cut through the air like a bullwhip.

I clung desperately to Heather’s fingers until they were forced apart, millimeter by millimeter, each inch of separation feeling like a small death.

"ELENAAA!" Dave screamed, his tiny, shrill voice echoing off the concrete walls as he tried to chase after me, only to be hauled back by his shirt collar. The sound of his frantic, helpless voice almost shattered my soul into dust.

"Throw her in the car," my mother commanded the three men standing by the iron gate, not offering a single backward glance to her weeping children. "And tell the driver if she escapes again, the money comes out of his pocket."