After I Learned To Obey Why Did My Family Start To Regret It? Chapter 05
The dungeon went silent.
Gerald stood there, unable to move.
Sean broke first. He bent down and pulled the broken pieces of the bangle from my hand.
“It’s just a bangle. Why fight like that? I’ll have someone fix it. Behave, and I’ll give it back.”
But I would never hold it again.
My body lay still on the floor.
Sean still did not understand.
His voice hardened.
“Harriet, don’t think you can ignore me and get away with this.”
I did not move.
He grabbed my arm and flipped me over.
“Harriet. I’m talking to you.”
He stared at my closed eyes. For a second, he paused. Then he laughed as if anger could explain what he was seeing.
He lifted one hand.
Two attendants stepped forward, unlocked the shackles from the wall, and fastened them around my wrists.
They dragged me to the torture rack and bound me there.
“I was supposed to buy Tiffany new clothes and go home to keep her company. Since you want to keep acting, I’ll give you something to act about.”
Gerald watched from the side. His brow tightened for the briefest moment, then smoothed again.
He had seen countless dead bodies.
Still, he did not notice.
How little must he have cared?
As a soul, I watched my own body hanging there.
Once, they had promised to love me forever.
Promises were fragile things.
One gust of wind, and they were gone.
An attendant threw a basin of cold water over my corpse.
Even outside my body, I shivered.
Sean’s irritation sharpened.
“Again. Let’s see how long she can keep this up.”
Gerald sat nearby, cold and distant. There was disgust in the way he looked at me.
Water struck my body again and again.
At last, the attendant stopped. He was panting, and from where he stood, he could hear no breath from me at all.
Sean snapped at him.
“What are you waiting for?”
The attendant flinched, then reached out to check beneath my nose.
He recoiled.
“Alpha… she’s not breathing.”
Gerald’s expression went still.
Before he could move, Sean strode to my body.
“Harriet?”
He checked for himself.
His hand froze.
“Get a doctor.”
Doctors treated the living.
What could they do for me?
No one dared say that aloud.
The attendant ran.
Sean stood beside my body, unable to speak.
Gerald recovered first.
“She was cruel by nature. Whatever happened to her, she brought it on herself.”
Tiffany had done every vicious thing and was still held like a treasure.
I was the one they called cruel.
I was the one they thought deserved death.
Sean’s confusion faded as Gerald spoke. He gave a shaky laugh and nodded.
“Good. If she’s dead, she can’t hurt Tiffany again. But she’s survived worse, hasn’t she? She fell off a cliff and still came back.”
My lashes seemed to tremble, though my body was already dead.
Sean picked up a red-hot branding iron.
Even now, he believed I was pretending.
When I faked my death two years ago, rumors spread through the whole pack.
They said my family regretted it so much they could not eat or sleep. They said their hair turned white overnight.
They said Gerald and Sean blamed themselves for sending me into hell.
One supposedly drowned himself in alcohol and stopped coming home.
The other shut himself in his room and refused to see anyone.
Rumors were only rumors.
False things did not become true just because people repeated them.
They had never loved me.
My death was probably good news to them.
Something worth celebrating.
