The Family's Regret, Too Late Now
My family accused me of betraying them, of nearly destroying the tech empire they had built from nothing.
As punishment, my father and two older brothers locked me in my room, leaving me without food or water until I confessed to a crime I didn't commit.
But when a medical condition flared and I began to suffocate, they dismissed my desperate screams for help as just another one of my "theatrics."
"She's just being dramatic," I heard them say through the thick oak door, right before they added extra bolts.
They were completely blinded by Ivy, the manipulative outsider I had welcomed as a sister. They chose her lies over their own blood, forgetting how I had secretly liquidated my own assets to save their company years ago.
I died alone, my last breath a desperate gasp in a house that refused to listen.
Then, I woke up.
Floating as a spirit above my own decaying body, I became a silent witness, waiting for the moment they would finally break down the door and be forced to see what they had done.
Chapters
Share
Chapter 4
Chelsea's POV:
The external light, harsh and unforgiving, cut through the suffocating darkness of the room. It illuminated the dust motes dancing in the air, the peeling paint on the walls, and the source of the unbearable stench.
My spirit, weightless and unseen, drifted closer. A cold dread, colder than any sensation I' d known in life, settled in my ethereal chest.
There, crumpled in a heap against the far wall, was my body.
The room had been stifling hot, the air thick and stagnant, a perfect incubator for decay. Now, the full horror of it was laid bare.
My skin was no longer the pale, sensitive canvas of an artist. It was discolored, blotchy, a gruesome tapestry of black and purple. Bloated. Distorted.
Tiny, white maggots, disturbingly active, writhed across the decaying flesh, a grotesque crown of life feasting on death.
My face, once familiar, was unrecognizable. Swollen and purplish-blue, mouth agape, eyes staring blankly at the ceiling. The tell-tale signs of asphyxiation were stark, undeniable.
I was… gone. The body was a husk, a forgotten vessel.
A wave of pure panic washed over my spirit, a visceral terror despite my non-existence. No! Don't look! I wanted to cover their eyes, to shield them from this horror, from me.
My decayed form. Bloated. Maggot-ridden. It was a grotesque parody of the human body. The dignity of death, stripped away by neglect and time.
Please, I screamed in my silent world, don't let them see me like this! Don't let them see what they let me become!
But my ethereal efforts were useless. I was a ghost, a whisper in the wind. They saw.
Corbin stood frozen in the doorway, his face a ghastly shade of white. The silence in the hallway was thick, heavy, suffocating.
He staggered backward, one hand flying to his mouth. His lips trembled, a violent, uncontrollable tremor. His eyes, usually steely and calculating, were wide, dilated with a mixture of horror and revulsion. The carefully constructed façade of the ruthless CEO, the composed patriarch, shattered into a million pieces.
"What… what is this?" His voice was a choked whisper, stripped of all its usual authority, barely audible above the buzzing flies.
Emilio and Erland, huddled behind him, their faces mirroring their father's shock. Their initial arrogance, their annoyance, their certainty that this was all a trick – it evaporated like mist in the sun. The joke they had convinced themselves I was playing had just curdled into a nightmare.
Emilio let out a strangled sound, a gagging noise, and clapped a hand over his mouth and nose, his body convulsing.
Erland stood rigid, paralyzed by the sight. His fists clenched and unclenched at his sides, a silent battle waging within him.
The smell of death, now unleashed, permeated every corner of the house. It clung to their expensive suits, wormed its way into their nostrils, a constant, sickening reminder of what lay beyond the door. It was a suffocating blanket, heavy and inescapable. It was the stench of their neglect, their unforgivable betrayal.
My spirit hovered, helpless, watching their faces crumple. Please, I thought again, don't see this. Don't see what your indifference has wrought. But then a wave of cold clarity hit me. It's too late. I am this. And you did this.
A young housemaid, standing on the fringes of the group, let out a piercing shriek. "Oh, God! It's… it's in there!" Her shaking finger pointed at my body. "It's… it's Miss Chelsea! The dress! It's the one she wore three days ago!"
Her words, sharp and undeniable, plunged the hallway into a deeper, heavier silence.
Corbin roared, a primal sound of denial and rage. "No! It's not her! She's just playing a trick! She's hiding somewhere! This is… this is a prop! A sick, twisted joke she's playing because she's jealous, because she can't stand Ivy getting attention!"
His eyes, however, betrayed the lie. They were fixed, horrified, on my mangled form. He couldn't tear his gaze away. Then, his eyes landed on my hand. Or what was left of it.
On my ring finger, a simple, silver ring. A cheap, mass-produced trinket I had bought myself years ago, a small act of rebellion against the family's obsession with expensive jewels.
Corbin' s breath hitched, a ragged, choked sound. His body stiffened, then slowly began to tremble. He stared at the ring, then at the face, the bloated, black-and-blue parody of his daughter. The fight between denial and crushing reality played out on his face.
This wasn't a game. This wasn't a trick. This was death. Ugly, gruesome, irrefutable death.
"Close the door," he whispered, his voice thin and reedy. "Close it now."
He turned, his face ashen, green around the gills. He looked like he was about to vomit.
"Everyone out!" he croaked, his voice cracking. "Get out! I… I need to think."
He needed to escape. To outrun the reality that had just slammed into him. But the stench, the image, the horror of it – it would cling to them all, forever.
Keep Reading
The story is getting intense! Switch to App to
Unlock All Chapters
You may also like
9.7
"Be my wife for eight months and I will save you from this hell. But if you fall in love with me? I will destroy you."
She wasn't sold for a price. She was lost in a bet.
A dark deal made in the shadows between a father who sold his own daughter without thinking twice and the man who runs the Blackwood empire. The CEO who doesn't just own money. He owns the city. He owns the law. He owns the men and their fates.
She was just a normal designer until she became his wife on paper. A wife to a man who knows no mercy. A man who never loses a deal. A man who refuses to let the woman carrying his name be weak.
Eight months. A marriage with no love. Strict rules. Forbidden feelings.
But what happens when the deal turns into a deep hunger? What happens when the contract becomes a cage? What happens when she finds out that running away from her father put her in the trap of a man who is a thousand times more dangerous?
Her father sold her in a bet. And her only escape was the man who owns the city.
7.7
Married off to him to pay a debt that was never mine, my only purpose was to give him an heir.
Year after year, my foolish heart fell harder while he shattered it without mercy.
When my service ended, my debt paid, and no child to bind us, I chose freedom through divorce.
But just when I thought I was free...
I was bound to him again.
Bound by his child.
7.4
I never expected to be branded a 'fake heiress' and a 'scheming bitch' on my own wedding anniversary.
"Did you really think we'd never find out you faked the DNA test?" My mother's voice cut like a blade. "You've been impersonating our real daughter all along."
The irony was suffocating. They were the ones who stormed into my peaceful life, insisting that I was their long-lost child-no proof needed. And now they dared to call me the fraud.
"Since Camille has finally returned to where she belongs," my father declared coldly, "it's time for you to crawl back into whatever shadow you came from."
Then came the final blow. My husband of five years didn't even hesitate.
"I'll have the divorce papers drawn up immediately. Don't make this difficult, Mirena. You were never meant to be my wife."
Overnight, I was discarded. The scandal of the city. The woman who stole a life that was never hers.
But they forgot one thing: I never needed them.
Before I was George Ashton's wife, I was Mirena Sterling-the Investment Queen. The woman who broke Wall Street records before she turned twenty-five. A racing champion. A tech prodigy.
I walked away from all of it. Gave up my empire. My crown. My name. All for a man who threw me away like garbage the moment someone "better" came along.
Big mistake.
On the night they cast me out, soaking wet and humiliated, I ran into the last person I ever wanted to see.
"Look at you now, Mirena," Alexander Pierce murmured, watching me with those piercing eyes. "The woman who once ruled the financial world. Reduced to this." He tilted his head. "And for what? Love?" A dark laugh. "Pathetic."
My former rival. The man who spent years trying to beat me-and never once succeeded. Now he stood before me, a Wall Street titan, watching my downfall with hungry satisfaction.
He thought he'd seen the last of me.
He was wrong.
The game was simple now: drop the dead weight, reclaim what's mine, and remind everyone why they feared my name.
Within months, I was back. Every market moved when I breathed. Every headline screamed my return. The Sterlings came crawling, begging for mercy they'd never shown me. And George? He watched in horror as I bought his most prized company without blinking.
The divorce he'd so eagerly signed? His greatest regret.
"Mirena, please," he begged, groveling at my feet. "Give me another chance."
I didn't even look at him. "Sorry, darling. I don't recycle trash."
But what I didn't expect was him.
Alexander Pierce dropped to one knee in front of me-the man who had once mocked my fall, now looking up with something raw and undisguised in his crimson gaze.
"I knew you'd take back everything they stole," he said, voice low. "Now..." A slow, dangerous smile curved his lips. "Take me too."
7.7
I was kneeling on the warped linoleum of my trailer, packing my life into a trash bag, when the predatory purr of a luxury SUV echoed through the thin walls. I thought it was a raid, but it was something much worse.
Julian Sterling, a federal prosecutor in a charcoal suit, stepped into the mud and bought me from my alcoholic stepfather. He didn't use cash; he used a list of felonies and a legal settlement to trade my freedom for my stepfather's silence.
"Throw it away," Julian ordered, pointing at the bag containing everything I owned. I watched my sister's stuffed bear fall into an oil puddle as he forced me into a world of cold leather and silence. By the time we reached Boston, Faith Vance was dead. He forced me to sign papers changing my name to Elara, erasing my past to fit a narrative of Swiss boarding schools and high-society breeding.
The horror didn't stop there. The family patriarch, Arthur Sterling, looked at us with hawk-like eyes and issued a command that turned my blood to ice. To avoid scandal, Julian and I were to be introduced as "Brother" and "Sister." Julian's jaw tightened until a vein throbbed in his temple, and when he finally called me "Sister," the word sounded like a curse.
I was a prisoner in a mansion with bars on the windows, caught between a "brother" who loathed my existence and a cousin who tried to assault me in my own room. They dressed me in silk armor and expected me to be a doll, a manageable piece of a legacy I never asked for.
I sat at a dinner table worth more than my hometown, swallowing oysters that tasted like salt and iodine, while Julian created a physical barrier between me and the wolves. Under the tablecloth, I reached out and squeezed his clenched fist.
His fingers uncurled and captured mine in a grip so crushing it felt like a pact signed in the dark. I have a jagged shard of glass in my pocket and five thousand dollars a month to hoard. Julian says the law is a weapon that breaks weak people, but he's about to find out that I'm not a lamb. I'm a survivor, and I'm ready for the casualties.
9.4
On our wedding anniversary, I came home to find my husband, Jace, celebrating with another woman in our living room.
She was wearing my mother's necklace-the only thing recovered from the explosion that killed my parents. Jace laughed, calling it a "cheap piece of junk," and tried to write me a check to buy a new one.
His family called my parents' ashes "garbage" and "unsanitary." When I confronted them, Jace sided with his mother, ordering me out of the penthouse I secretly owned. He let his friends publicly humiliate me, calling me a gold-digging leech with no background.
But that wasn't the worst of it. When a gunman stormed the restaurant we were in, Jace shoved me directly into the line of fire to shield his mistress.
The shotgun blast tore through my arm. As I lay bleeding on the marble floor, I stared at the man who had just used me as a human shield, his face pale with terror as he protected her.
In that instant, every ounce of love I ever had for him died. The pain in my arm was nothing compared to the cold, hollow void that consumed my heart.
He thought he was sacrificing a quiet, useless wife to secure his future. He had no idea he had just declared war on Captain Cilla Henson, West Point valedictorian and the most lethal operator of the Eagle Task Force.
7.6
I was the ultimate trophy wife, a polished ornament in Francisco Zimmerman’s billionaire empire. For three years, I perfected the "Zimmerman Wife Smile," playing the role of the devoted partner while smoothing the Egyptian cotton of his shirts.
The illusion shattered when I stood outside his study and heard him laughing with his mistress, Annalise.
"She’s just a vase that only knows how to smile," Francisco’s voice was cold, devoid of any warmth. "As long as I pay the maintenance fees on time, she stays obedient."
I walked out that night with nothing but a canvas bag and the clothes on my back. But Francisco wasn't finished with his "asset." He froze my bank accounts and used his massive influence to blacklist me from every interior design firm in New York. He tracked my phone, watching me struggle from the shadows, waiting for me to starve so I would crawl back to his mansion.
He even showed up at the dive bar where I was playing piano for rent money, mocking my desperation.
"You have technique, but no heart," he sneered, tossing a silver coin into my tip jar as if I were a beggar. "You're hollow, Iris. Just like your pride."
I couldn't believe this was the same man whose life I had saved during a bloody night in Macau. To him, I wasn't a wife; I was a stock price that needed stabilizing. The more I fought for my independence, the tighter he pulled the net, determined to break my spirit until I had no choice but to return to his gilded cage.
Then, the morning sickness hit. I realized I wasn't just carrying my own life anymore—I was carrying his heir. If Francisco found out, he would never let us go; he would turn my child into another "performance bonus" for his brand.
Looking at the sonogram, I knew a divorce would never be enough to escape a man who thought he owned the world.
"I'm not going back," I whispered, staring at his yacht moored in the harbor. "To save this baby, Iris Potter has to die."