The Secret Heiress | ✔️

20 | 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝚐𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚝𝚎𝚜𝚝 𝚛𝚘𝚖𝚊𝚗𝚝𝚒𝚌 𝚑𝚎𝚊𝚍𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚎

☘︎ Jᴇɴɴɪғᴇʀ Rʏsᴏɴ ☘︎

When my father found out what I'd done by pulling that trigger in the dark, he'd crumbled.

I still remember the father who always stood strong, always told me to stand back up whenever I fell, how his knees gave out at the sight of my mother's form lying on the floor motionless with the bullet etched right between her forehead.

He'd crawled to her, had held her in his arms and kissed her forehead over the bullet wound so tenderly, not caring about the blood that stained his mouth from the wound, not caring about the poison that might touch his lips from the bullet. He'd kissed her like she was the most precious thing in the world. To him, she was. Mom was Dad's everything.

And at that moment, I'd felt like a monster for taking her from him. My hands were shaking, my mind couldn't make sense of what was happening. There was this constant ringing in my ears, this strange delusion that someone was watching me. I knew I should drop the gun but I'd kept holding it in a white-knuckled grip. I'd felt paralyzed to my bones, paranoid out of my mind.

"Violet. . .did you. . ." Dr Hareith had whispered, staring at the gun in my hand, at me like I was a nasty demon. I very much felt like one too.

I'd nodded my head, shook it, then nodded again. I don't know I don't know I don't know. My mom was pale in my father's arms, unmoving, dead dead dead.

I killed her.

There was a heart-rending sob building inside me but I was in shock, my tears frozen. I couldn't move an inch from where I stood, still couldn't process the reality of the situation I was in.

"Violet, what did you do?!" Suddenly, Hareith wasn't whispering anymore, she was screaming in grievance. Grievance of loosing her best friend. Her best friend who she lost because of me. She was screaming and crying so loud and in so much pain that the sound of more footsteps hurrying towards the room could be heard.

Dad should've despised me for what I did, should've given me over to the law enforcement for the crime I committed, for what I took from him. But he didn't do any of it. After gently shutting mom's eyelids, carefully placing her down and composing himself enough to stop sobbing even if slow tears still trickled down his eyes, Dad had approached me and whispered almost inaudibly, "Violet, you must go."

Samuel Davidson might never express it outright but he didn't love me in that very moment when he saw me crouched over my mother's form, over the love of his life's form, holding a gun that killed her. If he'd given me over to the police like I knew in that moment he wanted to, then it would cause Davidson Group's reputation the greatest hit. And he didn't want to loose another thing he loved.

It wasn't me in that moment he loved. How could he when I took his everything from him? He chose Davidson Group over me. And I understood. I understood why he needed to claim me dead so even when Hareith screamed to the world what Violet did, there wouldn't be any Violet to put the blame on. Because Violet Davidson was going to be dead too.

I didn't know how he managed to fool the world by switching the corpse of a girl my age from the morgue and displaying her as the dead Violet Davidson, or how he put the blame of the entire incident on a red-listed gang shooter running from the police. But he was successful. And when Dr Hareith screamed about a daughter killing her mother, she just seemed like a woman who had lost her mind after witnessing her best friend's death. Same went with anyone who'd accidentally witnessed the whole incident that day. They were a bunch of crazy people to the world. Because the said daughter had died herself.