Chapter 184 My past
Chapter 184 My past
ANASTASIA POV
I walked in, dropping my Chanel bag onto the mattress with a heavy thud. “Hello, mother… or should I say, Mrs. Williams?”
Immediately, thick tears welled up in her faded eyes, spilling over her wrinkled cheeks. “Ro… Ro… Ry…” she wheezed, her deformed mouth shivering violently as she struggled to form the syllables.
I shook my head, my expression turning to ice. “I’m not Rory. I’m not Aurora, and I am certainly not your dear Project 39. My name is Anastasia, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Harrison.”
She couldn't speak. Her trembling, frail arms reached up into the air toward me, her fingers curling in a desperate, pleading gesture.
“How does it feel?” I demanded, my voice cutting through the sterile room like a blade.
“How does it feel ripping me away from my real life, from my family, just to satisfy your sick thirst for scientific power and illegal trafficking? Tell me!” My voice cracked violently on the last word, the raw emotion burning my throat.
“I—I’m s…sorry…” she whispered, the words slurring heavily over her tongue.
“Don't you dare tell me you're sorry! You don't get to beg now!” I stepped closer, crowding her wheelchair, the buried trauma exploding out of me. “Did you listen to my tears when I begged you and your husband to let me go? Did you listen when I looked at you with a face full of hope when you first brought me into your house? Sure, you might have saved me from that plane crash, but you put me through something a thousand times worse! You stole my fucking identity! I lost my hearing from the trauma, and you looked at me with those fake, loving, motherly eyes and told me I was born that way!”
More tears slipped down my face, hot and furious.
“Do you have any idea what you did? I worked plenty of jobs, different per time jobs, saved up scraps and spent every dime paying for my mother's hospital bills...The same mother who ruined my life. You turned me into a stuttering, terrified weakling! You fed me those pills—over a thousand pieces of chemical poison—and told me to always take them because they stopped the headaches. You told me it helped with my hearing! Even when your own health started deteriorating from your failed experiment, you still forced me to take them. You were killing me slowly, day by day!”
The room felt suffocating. This woman and her dead husband were the architects of my absolute ruin.
“You know about the death camp, right?” I let out a harsh, broken laugh. “I was sent to the death camp for seven months. Seven brutal months, Mrs. Williams. I was in there without your poisonous pills. I spent weeks sweating, shaking, longing for them, praying for someone to bring them to me. I had no idea that by starving of those pills, I was actually gaining my real self back. If I hadn't been sent to that hellhole, I would still be living a lie. I would have never discovered that those pills were designed to suppress my neural pathways and wipe my memory, so I would never remember a single detail of who I was! You ruined everything! Did I deserve a single ounce of your brutality?!”
She shook her head weakly, sobbing so hard her fragile chest rattled. “For—forgive m—me, pl-ease,” she gasped out, a wet, violent cough hacking from her throat.
On any normal day, the old Rory would have rushed to her side, rubbing her back and tending to her illness. But Rory was dead. Right now, Anastasia was fighting the overwhelming urge to pull a weapon and put a bullet directly into her skull.
“You do not deserve my forgiveness,” I told her, my voice dropping into a dangerous, deadly whisper. “In fact, killing you right now would be an act of mercy. And I won't give you that mercy. You are going to stay alive in this room, rotting in this chair, and I will keep coming back here just to talk shit to your face. I will parade myself right in front of you—the perfect, living proof of your failed project.”
“I tr—tried to s-stop it, Ror—”
“No, you didn't!” I screamed, cutting her off. “Every time you tried to stop your husband from hooking those horrific machines to my head, he found a way to convince you, and you just let it go! You would give me a pathetic, pitying face, tell me to come eat dinner, and the second I was done swallowing my food, you pushed me right back onto that torture bed with those heavy metal bands clamped over my skull! You are wicked. You and your dead husband ruined me entirely. You changed me so badly that when my own husband finally saw me as Rory, he couldn't recognize me. He couldn't love me properly because he was grieving me!”
I paced the floor, the heels of my Chanel flats clicking sharply against the tile.
Author's note: Preach, Ana!!📢