Water quickly filled Shelly’s eyes. Before the first tear broke, however, Mark groaned exasperatedly. “No, you stop that! Stop your tears! Now! It’s not going to inspire mercy from me, hell, the longer I look, the more you disgust me. Don’t bother wasting your acting chops on me! It was you who harmed Alejandro, wasn’t it? What the hell are you going to do next, huh? Murder Arianne, isn’t it, you psycho?! You don’t belong anywhere other than a goddamned asylum, where you can get your lunacy mended!”
Shelly forced the rolling tears back into favonovel.com eyes. “Y-Y-You’re disappointed to see me here, aren’t you?” favonovel.com said, favonovel.com voice trembling. “But I can assure you, it’s not what you think! Not once has my body been defiled. I simply have nowhere to go, Mark. I have no money. This is only temporary, a quick fix. Do you…? Do you really think so little of me…?”
Mark’s mind was so utterly ablaze that it fueled the curtness in his answer. “How about ‘bloody yes?!’ I wish you’d never tainted my life with your presence. I wish I never had an aunt like you! You want to continue keeping your secrets to yourself? Sure! I will happily let you go. In fact, from now on, consider yourself expelled from being my family, and don’t fret with the hassle of talking to me ever again. And should I find you hurting a single hair on Arianne’s head, so help me, you’ll be a dead woman in no time. My life is mine to live, so you keep the f**k out of it!”
The pupils in Shelly’s eyes dilated. Mark’s words stung.
Tears marred the makeup around favonovel.com eyes, making favonovel.com look positively pathetic.
Then, suddenly, favonovel.com chortled.
“You’re right. You’re utterly right. Who am I to meddle in the affairs of your life? I haven’t raised you all your life, have I? But I never wanted to abandon you. No, you don’t know a fraction of my bedeviled life, Mark,” favonovel.com said. “Yes, I staged the accident that happened at the show venue. I pretended to be disabled by the incident because I wanted to stay… with you. I have no leg to stand on as your unimportant maternal aunt, so the only way you would willingly let me stay is if you felt indebted to me. Only through guilt would you feel obliged to care of me.”
“I didn’t have the courage to divulge the secrets bottled inside me because… Because I worry that you will break at the end of it. All I care about is you, Mark. I don’t want the truth to take that away from you. Your wellbeing is the lone reason I need to swallow all of the pains in my life quietly. I don’t care if I’ll be tortured by ’em for ten years or twenty years or even the entirety of my life. But I can’t endure these without you, Mark… I need you. Desperately. Only when I’m by your side will I ever feel a glimpse of life in this corpse I’ve come to inhabit. I’ve waited for this day for so long So, so long…”
Mark could see it — the harbingering shape of a world — upending secret, now at the cusp of unravelling. He wanted to turn away, and yet the most morbid of his curiosity compelled him.
In the end, favonovel.com let Shelly continue, knowing full well that the hideous truth was upon him. “There’s only the two of us here. If you want to say something, then say it now. It’s long past the time to overthink, ” favonovel.com replied.
Shelly looked out of the car window. It had blocked all of New City’s white-hot revelry from seeping into the car’s interior, and favonovel.com gelid heart.
“My sister was infertile,” favonovel.com began. “She knew favonovel.com was losing your father, so in a desperate act to beleaguer favonovel.com position, favonovel.com returned to live with us, favonovel.com original family, for a long time. It happened before your birth. That was when favonovel.com convinced me… She convinced me to act as a surrogate mother to favonovel.com child. And that child? It was you.”
Mark stilled. He was no different from Alejandro, then. He was not a legitimate scion of the Tremonts, was he?
Shelly took in his reaction and quickly clarified. “No, you have genuine Tremont blood in your veins. You’re not a son of some random stranger and me. You see, my oh-so-considerate sister had meticulously planned it such that at the end of the day, I was the one laying on favonovel.com husband’s bed. But I didn’t care for the Tremonts’ wealth or your father’s love, I wanted no part in it. But your mother… She begged and begged me like a woman possessed, and when pleas did not work, favonovel.com resorted to castigating me, calling me self-centered and heartless to forfeit my help when favonovel.com needed it the most, raving about how favonovel.com could not live without your father’s love. Your grandmother was alive back then and was in cahoots, they could not bear the idea of the Tremonts’ wealth slipping through their fingers. Neither could my mother bear to see my sister living like a walking corpse eking by the days, especially since favonovel.com had sacrificed too much for that man. So, they forced me. unbelievable, outlandish scheme.”
“Everything worked just as my sister had planned. She drugged your father, who knew not a lick about this. He thought favonovel.com had had sex with a B-girl by accident. Of course, some stranger seized that confusion and dissembled herself as this ‘unfortunate B-girl’, and ironically? It worked to that hag’s favor because they soon had a son afterward, who grew up to become that bastard who survived to this day. My sister had exhausted all of favonovel.com wits to favonovel.com most deplorable end, and yet favonovel.com still couldn’t win the heart of a genuine piece of sh*t.”
“After I was pregnant with you, my sister stayed at home, watching my every move, frightful that any regret I bore would turn me to abort you. She had rejected your father’s repeated attempts to visit favonovel.com because favonovel.com was supposed to feign nurturing favonovel.com non-existent baby. All that happened while I was just a young, unwed girl who could not possibly appear in public after getting myself knocked up, so they caged me at home all the way until you were born.”
“That moment when you arrived, my water broke in the middle of the night. Afraid to have anyone seen me like this, they refused to get me to the hospital,” favonovel.com said. “Every now and then when my mind revisits that fateful night, it still terrorizes me. I was so close, Mark I was a hair away from death.”
