Chapter 22: The Real Eve
The rain had not stopped all night. It hammered against the mansion’s tall windows, a steady rhythm of nature’s fury, while inside, Eve sat cross-legged on her bed, the dim glow of a single lamp illuminating her pale face. The journal pages she had burned earlier still left an acrid scent lingering in her room, smoke that clung to the air as though it refused to let go of her sins.
Her hands trembled—not from guilt, but from the memory of a life she had buried for years. Tonight, the past clawed back.
She closed her eyes, and the storm outside bled into the storm within.
Flashback
Her father was a man full of dreams, his eyes always burning with ambition. She remembered the day he left their little village, kneeling before her and promising, “Eve, my little star, when I return, I’ll have pockets full of gold. You’ll go to the best schools. You’ll wear dresses finer than the queen’s. Just wait for me.”
She had believed him. She had clung to that promise every night, counting the days until he would come home.
But her father never returned with gold.
He had gone to the city, leaving everything behind for his best friend, William Blackwood—Sienna’s father. William was a wolf in silk suits, charming, calculating, and merciless. He knew exactly how to mold men into pawns.
There had been three of them—William, her father, and Alexander.
Alexander was the odd one: a quiet, withdrawn boy who grew up in orphanages, but who possessed a brain sharper than any machine. Computers bent to his will. Numbers danced in his head like symphonies. He had no family, no attachments—only algorithms and codes.
Her father, on the other hand, was bold with people, confident in rooms filled with strangers, and daring in his decisions. He had money to invest, money scraped together from loans and the land they had mortgaged back in the village. Together, the three built something powerful—an empire growing with each international deal.
For a time, they were unstoppable.
But in the city, loyalty was poison.
Her father’s best friend—Sienna Blackwood’s father—was a genius at manipulation. He knew how to use people like pieces on a chessboard. And together, with Alexander, the quiet orphan who had mastered the world of computers, they built an empire from nothing.
At first, the deals soared. International contracts, shipments, and profits that could last generations. Her father believed in friendship, in handshakes, in words. But Blackwood believed in paperwork, loopholes, and traps.
Very smartly, Sienna’s father placed documents before him—contracts with small print so carefully hidden they looked harmless. Her father signed them, trusting his friend. Within days, he was stripped of all rights to the business. His name wasn’t on the company. His shares were gone. Worse, the loans had been secured under his name. He had been left holding nothing but debts.
Bankruptcy swallowed him whole.
Eve remembered that day as if it were carved into her skin. She was only fifteen. She walked into their shabby rented home to find her father slumped in a chair, tears rolling down his tired face. “I failed you, Eve,” he had whispered. Hours later, when she returned from fetching food, she found him hanging from the ceiling fan, lifeless.
Her scream that night had ripped through the walls. She had clung to his cold feet, begging him to come back, shaking the rope until her palms burned. The neighbors broke down the door too late. Her father was gone.
That night, she had lost the only person who had ever called her his star.
And William Blackwood? He thrived. His empire was celebrated. His name made headlines. His daughter, Sienna Blackwood, lived like royalty. William made sure he leave no trace of the families who were once his partners, leaving Eve with no records of her anywhere.
Eve’s mother couldn’t bear it. She drowned herself in grief, and weeks later, when driving in the rain, her car swerved into a tree. Eve was left standing at two fresh graves.
No family wanted her. No relative even looked her way.
The foster home was supposed to be her safety net, but it became another hell. One night, her foster brother forced himself on her, stealing her innocence and shattering what little childhood she had left. Eve never cried after that. She just ran. Ran away from the home, from pity, from weakness.
From then on, she grew up in shelters, streets, and lies. Every day she told herself the same thing—One day, the Blackwoods will pay.
Now, sitting in the luxurious house that once belonged to Sienna, Eve whispered into the darkness:
“You took everything from me, Sienna. Your father destroyed mine. And now, I’ll destroy you.”
She remembered running barefoot through the night, bloodied and bruised, vowing never to let herself be powerless again.
Shelters followed. Hunger followed. But so did rage.
By the time she turned eighteen, Eve knew one thing: she wasn’t just going to survive. She was going to make the Blackwoods bleed.
Back in the present, Eve opened a notebook. Her eyes were calm, unblinking. She traced Sienna’s signature across the page, curve by curve, stroke by stroke.
Perfect.
The same scam William Blackwood once pulled on her father… now she would use against his daughter.
Her lips curled into a cruel smile.
"This time," she whispered to the rain, "the empire will fall by my hands. And when it does, no one will remember the name Blackwood."
Eve slid the paper into the flames of the candle, watching Sienna’s signature burn into ash. The room filled with the bitter scent of smoke. And in that silence, her reflection in the mirror seemed to grin back at her—sharp, merciless, unrecognizable.
The real Eve had finally been born.
The room smelled of smoke and vengeance.
Meanwhile, in the Black Mansion on the far edge of the city, where even the richest dared not tread, a tall figure stood against the floor-to-ceiling glass façade. Alexander. The sea stretched out beneath the moonlight, wild and endless, just like the storm brewing inside him.
His reflection in the glass was sharp, his tailored black suit gleaming with understated luxury. His eyes narrowed as he remembered Sienna at the gala—glowing, untouchable, bathed in the wealth her father had stolen from others.
His lips curved into a cruel whisper.
“Revenge is not enough. You deserve pain, Blackwood.”