Chapter 120 - 0120: I Have To Leave This Marriage

Chapter 120: Chapter 0120: I Have To Leave This Marriage

Elena’s Point Of View

My mother’s eyes cut to me then. Just for a microsecond... sharp, venomous, flashing with a promise of terrifying violence. But as she turned back to the Sheriff, she lowered her head in flawless, humble submission.

"Yes, Sheriff," she whispered, her voice trembling with false gratitude. "I understand completely. Anything to keep my family safe."

The deputies turned to make their way back toward the iron gate. As they filed past me, the younger officer who had held my arm earlier lingered behind. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure my mother was looking away, then reached deep into his uniform pocket. He took my hand and pressed a tightly folded wad of cash into my raw palm.

"For you and your siblings," he murmured under his breath, his eyes filled with quiet, helpless pity. "To help buy food or whatever you kids need."

Before I could answer, he reached up and awkwardly ruffled my hair... a gentle, paternal gesture that almost made my knees buckle right there in the dirt. It had been so long since anyone had touched me with anything resembling tenderness that the gesture nearly undid me entirely. "And you, sweetheart... if she so much as raises her voice, if anything happens at all, you run straight down to the station. Don’t hesitate for a second. You hear me?"

I wanted to scream at him. I wanted to grab his bulletproof vest and shake him until the scales fell from his eyes, until he saw the monster standing three feet away from us. But my throat clamped shut, my tongue feeling like lead. All I could do was give a single, shaky nod as he walked away, and even that small motion cost me more strength than I had left to spare.

The heavy iron gate clicked shut. The patrol cars turned their engines over, their tires crunching slowly across the loose gravel until the sound faded completely into the distance.

The silence that settled over the yard afterward was unbearable.

The very second the police cruisers disappeared around the bend, my mother’s tears vanished as if they had never existed in the first place. Her trembling body straightened instantly. The soft, sorrowful curve of her spine turned to pure iron. Her face hardened into a grotesque sneer, her upper lip curling back over her teeth.

The transformation was so immediate, so absolute, that it still visited me in nightmares years later... proof that the woman crying on the porch had never existed at all, that she had only ever been a costume worn for an audience.

"You ungrateful, miserable little brat," she hissed. Her voice dropped into a low, poisonous octave that made the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up. "You ruined everything. Do you have any idea what you’ve done? Do you honestly think a few pathetic visits from the county sheriff are going to stop me? Do you think you’ve won?"

My chest heaved up and down with short, ragged breaths, but I forced my chin up. I met her deadly gaze without letting my eyes blink, drawing on some last reserve of defiance I hadn’t known still lived inside me.

"You’ve never given us anything," I said flatly, my voice hoarse and raspy from three days of screaming in the dark. "So we won’t have anything to miss."

Her face twisted in raw, ugly fury. She took a single, sudden step toward me, her right hand twitching violently at her side as though she wanted to tear my face open, but she stopped herself, her eyes darting toward the fence line where a few lingering neighbors were still watching.

"You’re going to pay for this, Elena," she spat, leaning in so close I could smell the cold tea on her breath. "Every single word that came out of your pathetic mouth today... you will pay for it. Mark my words."

She spun around on her heel, her lace skirt snapping against her legs, and marched up the porch steps. She slammed the front door behind her so hard the glass panes rattled in their frames, the heavy iron deadbolt clicking into place with a sickening finality.

The front yard fell dead quiet again, save for the wind rustling through the tall grass - and a faint, smothered whimper coming from the side window down the hall.

My weak, battered body wanted to collapse onto the dirt, but my heart ignited. I ran. bruised legs up the porch, pushed open the back door, and sprinted down the dark hallway toward the small store room where the deputies had unlocked the door.

I threw the door open.

Heather and Dave were huddled together in the corner on the dusty floorboards, clutching each other like two terrified puppies in a storm. Their wide, tear-stained eyes snapped up toward the light. The moment they recognized me, a synchronized gasp left their lips, and they threw themselves off the floor, launching their small bodies straight into my arms.

"Elena!" Heather sobbed hysterically, burying her face so hard into my neck I could feel her burning tears soaking straight through my collar.

"Where did you go?! Where were you?!" Dave whispered, his tiny eight-year-old voice cracking as his arms wrapped around my waist, clinging to me with every ounce of strength he had left. "We heard screaming... we thought she killed you! We thought you were gone forever!"

I collapsed onto my knees, wrapping my arms around both of them, pulling them in so tight I couldn’t tell where my heartbeat ended and theirs began. I buried my face in Heather’s messy hair, kissing the crown of Dave’s head, breathing in the familiar, dusty scent of them as though I could anchor all three of us to the earth by sheer force of will.

In that moment, nothing else in the world existed... not the bruises, not the lies, not the sheriff or the neighbors or the woman behind the slammed door. Only the three of us, alive, together, breathing the same dusty air.

"I’m here," I choked out, my whole body trembling as I squeezed them tighter. "I’m right here. I’m never going anywhere without you again. I promise you... I promise on Daddy’s grave. I will protect you. Both of you. No matter what it takes."

They clung to me like I was the last safe harbor in a cruel, dark world. And maybe, in that decaying house, I was.

For right now... just feeling their small, warm bodies pressed against mine, listening to the rhythmic rise and fall of their breaths, feeling their little hearts beating furiously against my ribs, it was enough to stop my hands from shaking. It was enough to remind me why I was still breathing.

For now... this had to be enough.

Back in the present, the memory faded, leaving me stranded in the cold, quiet reality of the guest room.

I was sitting at my vanity again, looking like an absolute stranger in my own life. The small table lamp cast a weak, amber glow across the dark polished wood, catching the tears that slid continuously down my cheeks, making them glisten like trails of wet glass.

I didn’t even bother raising a hand to wipe them away. What was the point? They just kept coming, heavy and hot, no matter how desperately I begged my body to stop.

It was that very police report... that terrifying, humiliating day in the yard, that had handed me my first bitter taste of freedom. It was the catalyst that drove me to bury myself under mountains of textbooks, to juggle three different part-time jobs like a circus performer spinning knives, to claw at every scholarship application with bleeding fingers just to prove to the world that I could stand on my own two feet without her shadow crushing me.

Every sleepless night, every missed meal, every application rejected before one finally said yes... all of it had felt like penance for a childhood I never chose.

But even with my own money, even with a college campus miles away... I had never truly been free.

My mother... God, even thinking the word made sour bile rise in the back of my throat... had kept Heather and Dave chained to her side like prized cattle. She knew exactly what those children were to me. They were her permanent leverage, her silver hook buried deep into my flesh.

Without them, she had no power over me. But as long as she held their lives in her hands, she owned every breath I took. I had built an entire life around checking in on them, sending money in secret, counting the days until they turned eighteen and could finally slip out from under her thumb the way I had.

A violent shudder racked my frame, and I shook my head hard, trying to beat the suffocating memories back into the dark corners of my mind.

"No," I whispered aloud, my voice sounding paper-thin in the empty room. "No more... That’s not even half of what she did to me, and look at me... I’m sitting here shaking like a terrified child all over again."

But the past doesn’t care about progress. It doesn’t care if you scream at it, or beg, or pretend you’ve moved on. It just digs its filthy claws deeper into your back. And tonight, I was bleeding out from those exact same claw marks.

My thoughts drifted before I could stop them, sliding helplessly away from my mother and straight into the new prison I had built with my own hands.

Him.

The man I had believed was my safe harbor. The man I had willingly built a life with. The man I had married.

My lips curled upward into a smile that wasn’t a smile at all. It trembled, it broke at the corners, and then it split open into a sharp, jagged laugh... a hollow, bitter sound that bounced off the high walls of the empty guest room, echoing back at me until I sounded just like my mother.

Love. What an absolute, sickening joke of a word.

I had believed... so stupidly, so desperately... that love was going to save me. I thought it would finally snap the rusted iron chains off my ankles, drown out the relentless echo of my mother’s poisonous voice, and transform me into someone clean, someone whole.

I genuinely believed I had outrun the generational curse of her house. I thought I had chosen differently. That I had chosen better. I had built an entire identity on that belief, brick by careful brick, only to watch it crumble in a single evening.

But here I was. Sitting alone in the dark, trapped in a different room, weeping over another man’s cruelty.

A ragged sob tore out of my throat before I could choke it down, ripping through my chest like a living thing. My shoulders heaved violently, my hands trembling where they clutched the edges of the vanity.

And somewhere out there... whether she was sleeping peacefully in her bed, sitting in her kitchen, or simply wandering around in my mind... my mother had to be laughing. She had to be laughing at my pathetic foolishness. Laughing that her stubborn, rebellious daughter had walked with her eyes wide open straight into another birdcage. This one was prettier, sure... it had shiny gold bars and velvet cushions, but it was still a cage.

The irony of it was completely unbearable.

I pressed my fingertips against the edge of the vanity so hard my fingernails bent backward, the polished mahogany groaning under the pressure. Hot tears splattered against the reflective surface, blooming into tiny, dark rain droplets.

"Are you happy now?" I whispered into the dark.

At first, I didn’t even realize I had spoken. The sound cracked and rattled through the quiet room, thin and fragile, but laced with an undercurrent of dark, boiling fury. I leaned closer to the oval mirror, staring directly into the red-rimmed eyes of the reflection that seemed to mock my existence. My skin was blotched, my eyes swollen, my lips trembling like a coward’s. A complete stranger was looking back at me.

"Is this what you wanted to see?!" I hissed at the mirror, my voice rising in a desperate, ragged crescendo. "To see me broken?! To watch me crawl on my knees all over again?! Just like you made me do back then?!"

The reflection didn’t answer. Of course it didn’t. It just stared back at me - hollow-eyed, exhausted, completely defeated.

But deep inside the quiet corridors of my brain, I could hear her voice clear as day: You ungrateful little brat. You really thought you could run from me? You really thought you could ever be free?

I flinched hard, slapping my palms over my ears as if she were standing right behind my shoulder. "Stop it!" I choked out, squeezing my eyes shut. "You’re not here! You’re not in this house!"

But she was. She was in the air I breathed. She was in every timid choice I made. She was everywhere.

I laughed again... a quiet, broken sound that died quickly in my throat. "God... you must be so proud of me, Cynthia. Look at your little girl. Married for love, just like in the fairy tales. And what did it get me? More chains. Just shinier ones."

I could almost hear her manicured hands clapping in approval.

My shoulders sagged, my arms dropping heavily back onto the vanity as I stared at my own ruined face. "I was so stupid," I breathed out, the words tasting like ash. "So impossibly stupid to believe... that anyone could ever look at me and just see me. That anyone could love me without wanting to own every single piece of my soul."

A thick sob climbed up my throat, but I forced my jaw shut, swallowing it down until my chest burned. No more. I couldn’t afford any more weakness.

I gripped the carved edges of the vanity until my knuckles turned white, using the physical pain to anchor my mind against the storm raging inside me.

"I can’t keep living like this," I whispered directly to my reflection, my eyes hardening into something sharp and dangerous. "I can’t keep letting cages find me. First hers. Now his. No more."

The silence stretched long and suffocating between us. The small desk lamp flickered once, buzzing faintly... the only silent witness to the vow I was making in the dark.

At last, I dragged the back of my bruised hand across my cheeks, smearing the wet tracks of tears across my skin. My voice was steadier when I finally spoke again, though the edges still shook with raw emotion.

"I have to leave this marriage."

The words hung in the cold air like thick smoke... dangerous, terrifying, and impossible to take back once spoken. My chest tightened until I couldn’t catch a full breath, but I forced myself to say the rest aloud, voicing the dark truth that had been tearing my soul apart all night.

"But how..." My voice broke, my lips trembling as fresh tears burned behind my closed eyelids. "How can I leave... when I still don’t know how to keep Heather and Dave safe?"