Chapter 28 #2
Absolute despair and rage broke through the sleeping pill's numbing effect. I don't know where I found the strength—maybe being pushed to complete madness by the vilest betrayal—but I lifted my foot and kicked that cracked kitchen door with everything I had.
The wooden door slammed into the wall and bounced back.
The voices inside stopped dead.
My father held his phone. My mother held her water glass. Both froze like someone hit pause, faces twisted in shock and horror as they turned to see me standing in the doorway.
"N-Nadia?" My mother's glass shattered on the floor. "You... you should be asleep..."
"Disappointed?"
I walked barefoot across the broken glass, step by step, into the kitchen. My face was corpse-white, eyes bloodshot and terrifying.
"Disappointed I didn't drink all that doctored milk? Disappointed I'm not dead in my dreams so you could quietly package me up for the underground auction and trade me for your precious son's worthless life?"
My voice was quiet but hoarse as gravel.
My father's panic lasted maybe two seconds. Then he hung up, tossed the phone on the counter. Every trace of fatherly love vanished from his face, replaced by cold calculation and furious resentment.
"Since you heard everything, we won't beat around the bush."
He laughed coldly, crossing his arms, looking down at me with zero affection—just the cold appraisal of merchandise.
"Nadia, don't look at us like that. You think you're still some mafia wife? You think the Sokolov family actually cares about you? If they did, would they let you run home covered in blood like that?"
His words were a knife in my festering wound, twisting.
"You've been thrown out like garbage! You're nothing now!" He pointed at my nose, spittle flying. "Your brother owes five hundred grand to loan sharks! If we don't pay up, they'll kill him! You're his sister—are you going to let our family line die out?"
"Sister?"
I laughed like I'd heard the world's funniest joke. I bent over laughing. Tears and blood streamed through my fingers. My whole body shook.
"Have you ever treated me like a daughter? Like a sister? My whole life, all you've seen is that waste Leon! He screws up, I take the blame. He gets in debt, you sell me to Roman. Now he gambled away more money, and you want to sell me to an underground auction for perverts to torture?"
I straightened up, my bloodshot eyes boring into the couple who gave me life. The rage in my chest threatened to consume me.
"Do you know what that place is? If I go there, I'll be tortured worse than death! I'm your daughter!!!"
Facing my anguished accusation, my mother didn't flinch. She actually stepped forward, her tone matter-of-fact, even harsh.
"So what? We gave you life. That life belongs to the family! You were always a money pit. Besides that face, what good are you?" She looked at me coldly, like I was an ungrateful animal. "Someone's willing to pay a million for you. That's a compliment!"
Every word landed with brutal finality.
All my fantasies, all my hopes, every pathetic scrap of longing for "home" and "parental love"—in that moment, with my mother's ice-cold words, it was all ground into dust.
This was what it meant to die inside.
No sharp pain. No struggle. Just endless, bottomless cold.
I looked at these familiar yet strange faces and suddenly felt everything was meaningless. I didn't even have the energy to argue.
"Fine." I nodded, my voice flat as dead water, and turned toward the door. "Then we have nothing to talk about. I'm leaving. Whether you live or die—I don't care."
"Think you can leave?"
The moment I turned, my father lunged. He grabbed my hair from behind and yanked hard.
"Ah!"
I cried out. The force slammed me to the ground. My head cracked against the cabinet edge. Dizziness washed over me.
"Richard! Quick! Hold her down! Don't let her get away! The buyer's people will be here any minute!" my mother shouted frantically.
I fought back desperately, my bloody hands clawing at my father's arms. But the sleeping pills were kicking in harder, and combined with days of weakness and my injuries, I was no match for a grown man.
My father slapped me hard across the face. My lip split. My ears rang.
"You bitch! Still trying to run?" He pinned me down, face twisted, yelling at my mother. "Get rope! Tie her up! Lock her in her room!"
My mother grabbed rough nylon rope. They treated me like livestock headed for slaughter, wrenching my arms behind my back and binding them tight. The coarse rope dug into my already mangled wounds. Blood soaked through instantly. But I clenched my jaw. I didn't make a sound.
They dragged me from the kitchen like a corpse, back to that small dark bedroom.
They threw me on the bed.
My father stood in the doorway, looking down at me. His eyes were utterly cold. "You stay here. When the people come for you, you better cooperate. Otherwise, I've got plenty of ways to make you beg for death."
He backed out and slammed the door.
Two crisp, familiar metallic sounds in the silent night.
They'd locked the door from the outside.
The room had no lights. Blackout curtains blocked the night. The entire room plunged into suffocating darkness.
Once again, I'd been locked in a dark room.
Hands bound behind me, I curled up on the bed like a dying fish.
But this time, the claustrophobia that usually haunted me didn't come like a tidal wave. I didn't scream. Didn't shake. Didn't throw myself hysterically at the door.
I just lay there quietly, eyes open, staring into the endless dark.
Tears slipped silently from the corners of my eyes, soaking into the cold sheets.
Only now, standing behind that locked door again, did I finally understand one brutal truth.
My whole life, I'd been trying to escape dark rooms. I thought I'd escaped childhood shadows, escaped the Sokolov manor basement, thought if I ran home I'd find light.
But I was wrong.
This "home" I'd fought so hard to return to, these parents I thought might have a shred of love left—they were the coldest, most vicious, most inescapable darkness of all.
Roman's betrayal killed my love.
My parents' deal extinguished my last illusion about the world, about human nature.
In the darkness, I heard my parents outside in hushed, happy voices discussing how to spend that hundred twenty thousand. I heard the drizzling rain outside. A thought surfaced in my mind.
It would've been better if my mother had never given birth to me.
Then I wouldn't have had to live this shit life.
Maybe from the lingering sleeping pills, I drifted off again.
Half asleep, my body suddenly felt incredibly light, light enough to float like a cloud escaping through the narrow window.
No worries. No restraints. Just endless joy and freedom.
After flying for who knows how long, gravity returned, pulling me back to earth.
I opened my eyes and looked through the window crack. Still overcast.
I understood.
It was just a dream.