Chapter 177: Karma Was Cruel
Eleanor’s heart slammed against her ribs like a trapped beast. Her entire body went rigid, cold sweat drenching the silk of her collar as the warm metal of the silver barrel pressed steadily into her forehead.
What in the world was going on? The spineless, pathetic woman she had spent years maltreating, starving, and placing beneath her own daughter’s boots was suddenly acting like a completely different person—a ruthless, unblinking monster who wouldn’t hesitate to paint the foyer with her brains.
A twin...
The horrific thought flashed through Eleanor’s mind, making her stomach violently turn. But she immediately shook the thought out, gulping as her throat rolled with suffocating terror. No. It’s impossible. I made sure that child was taken away years ago. There is no way it’s her standing here now... It can’t be!
April slowly shifted her unblinking gaze back onto Eleanor. The older woman flinched violently, gasping for breath as if the devil itself had just reached into her very soul to measure her sins.
She gripped her manicured hands tightly at her sides, but her knuckles couldn’t stop trembling against the silk of her dress.
"What’s the matter?" April asked, her voice dropping into a chilling, clinical murmur that sent a shiver down the spine of every person in the room. "Scared your secret is getting exposed?"
Eleanor’s lips parted, but not a single sound managed to escape her terrified throat.
Just then, a heavy, deep voice echoed down from the top landing, shattering the suffocating standoff in the foyer.
"We found them!"
Upstairs, the sound of heavy boots echoed as the black-market enforcers emerged from the dark corridor of the third floor.
April didn’t lower her gun from Eleanor’s head, but her dark eyes flicked upward toward the grand staircase.
Two enforcers were carefully descending the marble steps. The first guard carried the frail, motionless body of Beatrice, whose pale skin was already drained of warmth, her eyes closed in eternal rest after years of quiet, painful neglect.
Right behind him, another enforcer stepped out, carrying the limp, pale frame of Emily in his arms.
Around Emily’s neck was a violent, ugly purple line—a fresh rope burn.
It seemed that driven to absolute despair upon finding her mother dead in the locked room, Emily had tied a bedsheet to the ceiling beam in a desperate bid to end her own torment.
The enforcers had kicked the door open just in time, cutting her down seconds before her airway completely collapsed.
Emily was gasping for thin, shallow drafts of air, her tear-stained brown eyes wide with a mixture of agony and terror. She was sobbing uncontrollably.
As the guard set Emily down near the bottom of the stairs, her blurred vision slowly adjusted to the light of the foyer.
The first person her eyes caught was the woman holding a gun. And the moment her eyes landed on April, Emily’s ragged sobs choked directly off in her chest.
Her grief-stricken mind went completely blank.
The woman holding a gun pointed at her despicable step mother... had her exact face.
It stunned Emily so deeply that, for a brief, frozen second, her agonizing sorrow was entirely suspended in sheer, speech-robbing disbelief. She stared at April as if looking at a ghost born from her own reflection.
Simultaneously, Victor, Clara, and Julian gasped in collective horror, their eyes darting wildly between the gasping girl on the floor and the cold woman holding the gun.
"T-Two..." Victor choked out, his knees buckling as he collapsed backward onto the stairs, his face completely drained of color. "There’s... two of them?!"
April ignored the family’s pathetic panic entirely.
She finally let down the gun from Eleanor’s forehead and walked towards Emily. Then, she dropped to one knee in front of her, reaching her hand to touch the stunned woman’s face.
She stared at the agony tearing at her, at the horror she must’ve had to go through for her to result in taking her own life. Her eyes landed on the purple bruise around her neck...
This woman that was her twin... She seemed to have gotten her own share of suffering and it was much worse than hers.
It seems Karma was cruel to both of us. She thought, her eyes rolling towards where the limp body Beatrice laid. It seems my gut feeling was right all along. If I were a little later than this...
She did not think more of it. Instead, she pulled out a glass vial of Revitalization Water from her spatial dimension letting it appear before her hands for all to see.
"You... who are you?" Emily finally asked, her voice strained, cracked and small. She barely had any voice left after screaming and crying by her dead mother’s side.
"Don’t worry, we’ll get to that later," April said.
Uncapping the vial, she poured the sparkling liquid past Emily’s bruised, trembling lips.
A few seconds after the miracle water touched Emily’s tongue, a warm, soothing energy surged through her, instantly clearing every bruise and ache on her body, the purple rope mark around her neck, and flushing healthy color back into her pale cheeks.
Emily was beyond words staring at her hands and feeling her body become much lighter. Something like this... If she had her hand on something like this sooner, would her mother have...? Her eyes teared up again, her shoulders trembling as she looked back at her mother’s limp body. She could’ve saved her.
April watched Emily as she cried, as she trembled, as she regretted but could not offer any words to console her. She just watched and when she felt the time was ticking, she decided the best she could do to help Emily was get back at the ones who caused her suffering.
"Take her to the car," April commanded flatly to the enforcer, her tone completely devoid of dramatic sentiment.
The guard nodded, carefully lifting the silently sobbing Emily into his arms and carrying her out the front doors toward the armored SUVs.
April stood up smoothly, her gaze briefly sweeping over the cold, lifeless form of Beatrice resting on the floor one more time.
A tight, unfamiliar weight settled deep in her chest, but she didn’t waste time on empty regrets. She turned her body back toward the staircase, her dark eyes locking onto the cowering family.
"Nat," April flatly ordered. "Seal the doors. Nobody leaves."
"Already done, sweetheart," Nat replied smoothly, his hands tucked in his pockets as his men slammed the heavy oak doors shut, throwing the deadbolts into place.