“You already have everything. Why would you pay someone to rape Marianne?”
“Do you have any idea how much a girl's reputation matters? You nearly got her killed.
Every one of them rose from their seats at that.
They looked at me with nothing but contempt and righteous fury.
My father left the couch and came straight at me.
“Did you really pay someone to do that to Marianne?”
The stepmother rushed over too, jabbing a finger at me. “Whatever you did to us before, fine. But now you'd go this far to ruin her? Thank God Ronald saved her in time.”
Before I could get a word out to deny it, a slap landed across my face.
It was hard. I lost my footing. My cheek burned, and blood ran from the corner of my mouth.
“You animal, say something!”
“Exactly like your mother. Back then she sent someone to beat her until she lost the baby. Two of a kind, mother and daughter, both vicious in the same way.”
The Gilberts said nothing, but they had already despised me in their hearts.
“Didn't I tell you not to speak? Why wouldn't you listen?”
“Losing her mother already made my sister pitiful enough. Even if she did something worse to me, I wouldn't be angry.”
“People always say stepmothers and stepsisters are wicked, but not every stepmother and stepsister is wicked!”
I stood up and wiped the blood from my mouth. My heart went cold, bit by bit.
“You only listened to what you wanted to hear. Not one of you ever asked me whether I did it.”
“I have one answer, and it's no.”
“Your mother was the one who hired someone to cause her own miscarriage, then pinned it on my mother. Now you've learned her trick and you're using it on me.”
“We didn't do it. If you insist on saying we did, then I'll prove myself with my own death.”
With that, Marianne threw herself at the wall.
Ronald lunged after her and caught her.
With Ronald there, how could she ever have died?
But no one in that room could see it.
“Let me die, let go of me!”
“No. The one who deserves to die isn't you. It's her!”
Ronald had someone hold Marianne back, then stalked over to me, shaking with rage.
“There's nothing left to say between us.”
“Hand over the bracelet.”
I smiled, a bleak, hollow thing. I lifted my hand to slide the jade bracelet off.
But the band was tight, and without something to grease it, it wouldn't come.
Ronald lost his patience, thinking I was stalling on purpose.
He grabbed my arm and wrenched at the bracelet with brute force, not caring whether it hurt.
The pain scraped down to the bone, and I couldn't hold back a cry.
He didn't soften, as if he wouldn't stop until it was off.
When I heard the jade grind the bones in my hand apart, my tears splashed onto his wrist, and only then did the bracelet come free.
Everyone around me watched with open scorn, and my father, to protect Marianne, ordered me thrown out.
“Don't think that being my daughter lets you do whatever you want to Marianne and her mother.”
“Someone throw her out of the Henson house, so she can work that rotten nature out of her.”
“Once you've suffered enough to give up your spite, I'll take you back.”
But the stepmother stepped forward to stop him.
“Darling, if you throw her out like this, what will people think of me and Marianne? They'll assume the two of us bullied her.”
“For your sake, I won't hold any of it against her, everything she's done to us.”
“All she has to do is kneel down right now and apologize to us herself, and we'll treat it as if none of it happened.”
My father nodded, moved, then turned and gave me the order coldly.
“You animal, did you hear that?”
“Get over here and kneel down and apologize to your mother and your sister!”
I stood facing them, one person against the whole room.
“I never did those things, and I will never apologize!”
“And let me remind you of one thing. My mother is dead. Where would I get a mother on the cheap?”
Seeing that I not only refused to apologize but had thrown it back in their faces,
my father flew into a rage and gave the order on the spot. “You've turned on me. You dare defy me.”
“Someone break her legs. Let's see if she still has the nerve to talk back!”
Several bodyguards rushed over and pinned me down, and just as everyone fixed their eyes on the show, the front doors were kicked open from outside.
A crowd of well-trained, cold-faced bodyguards poured in.
“You think the Rogers family has no one left? A mere live-in son-in-law dares lay a hand on my Janie……
