Chapter 9 - The Anatomy of a Curse
I froze, my hand suspended in the air.
Agnes walked over to her small window, looking out at the rain-swept garden. "Seven years ago, your father wasn't just a businessman. He was desperate. He had gotten involved with a syndicate to fund his expansion, and when he couldn't pay, they didn't threaten his money. They threatened you."
She turned back to me, tears shining in her old, faded eyes.
"My brother worked security for those men. He overheard the order. They were going to take you, use you as leverage, and when they were done, you were never coming back. My brother brought you to me in the middle of the night, terrified."
I stared at her, my heart pounding like a trapped bird.
"I knew your father couldn't protect you," Agnes continued, taking a step toward me. "If I gave you back to him then, they would have tried again. So I signed those papers. I used my cousin’s name to place you in that residential home far away, where no one connected to the Charles family would ever look for you."
"And... Dad?" I forced out a tiny, raspy sound from my throat—a half-spoken question.
Agnes heard it and flinched slightly. "Your father found out three months later that I was involved. But instead of bringing you home, he panicked. He realized if the syndicate found out he knew where you were, the threat would return. So he made a deal with them. He paid them off, stopped the search, and adopted Claire to make the world think the family had moved on."
She walked over to me, reaching out with her trembling hands to gently touch my arms.
"Your silence, Rory... it wasn't a curse born from nowhere," Agnes whispered, her eyes searching mine. "When you were five years old, before you were taken, you heard your father arguing with those men in the study. You screamed at them to go away. You wished them dead. And that night, the lead enforcer’s car crashed off the bridge."
My eyes went wide.
"You thought your words killed him," Agnes said, tears finally falling down her cheeks. "You were so terrified of what you had done that you locked your own voice away. You chose silence to protect the people around you, believing your anger was a weapon."
The room seemed to tilt.
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The strange heat in my throat, the exploding lightbulb, the shattered glass at the party—it wasn't a dark magic or a demonic curse. It was a manifestation of my own suppressed trauma, a psychological force born from a child’s immense, terrifying guilt over an accident she thought she had caused.
I wasn't cursed. I was just a frightened girl who had spent seven years believing her voice was a monster.
