Mom’s voice was ice. Linda stood beside her, tears still on her cheeks, the corner of her mouth curving up just slightly.

Here we go again.

In my previous life, Mom only ever protected the fake daughter she'd raised with her own hands.

During a family trip around the world, Linda shredded my passport and I was stopped at the gate.

Mom didn't ask what happened. She just said I was a problem.

Said they'd go without me.

I held back my tears and went home to the estate alone, watching two months of Linda's beach vacation photos pile up online.

After that I learned to be smarter, I hid my important things, locked my room.

Stopped letting Linda walk in whenever she felt like it.

That made her angrier.

At a family dinner, she claimed her eight-million-dollar necklace had gone missing and only I had been in her room. She said I'd been acting sneaky, hiding things, locking doors.

Mom believed her immediately.

She had people smash my safe and break my lock. Even when there was no necklace, she banned me from ever locking my door again.

Said she was worried about what I might do.

In my previous life, no matter what I said, they called it excuses.

I was stupid back then. I didn't understand that Mom's heart was already tilted. She didn't care what I said.

I cried until I had no tears left, and I couldn't figure out why my own family despised me so much.

This life, I was done trying to understand.

I flipped the table. Glasses exploded across the floor.

"I did nothing wrong. I'm not apologizing to a bully. I already called a reporter. They're on their way to watch the Veil family's real daughter get framed and die."

Before they could react, I ripped out my IV and climbed out onto the windowsill.

The wound on my wrist split open from the strain, blood pouring freely.

The scene was grotesque. Perfect content for the news.

When two-thirds of my body was already hanging outside the window, Dad's voice cracked completely and his knees buckled and he nearly dropped to his knees..

"Eve, get down. Dad believes you. Dad was wrong!"

Linda was crying, but her eyes were triumphant.

She thought the crazier I acted, the more Mom and Dad would hate me.

But she'd forgotten how she'd always been favored, hadn't she?

Around here, the person who suffers the most gets the attention.

And honey, I'm genuinely suffering.

Dad's eyes were bloodshot, his voice shaking as he bargained:

"You're our daughter. Just come inside. You don't trust Dad? I'll make it up to you right now. Whatever you want."

Then he turned and called his secretary: "Transfer all five companies under my name to Eve."

He pressed a bank card into my hand.

"Five million spending money. Your birthday is the password."

I let go of the window frame and eased myself back inside.

Then I buried my face in his chest and sobbed, every bit of the hurt pouring out.

"Daddy, I thought you didn't love me, didn't believe me. I had no choice. This was the only way I could prove myself—"

Dad pulled me close and patted my back.

Mom's expression was complicated.

Jason stood off to the side, completely at a loss.

Only Linda, her eyes locked on me, pure venom.

Of course she was panicking. In my previous life, by this point she'd already wrecked my reputation completely.

Classmates, teachers: people were constantly showing up to report me for something. Theft, bullying, you name it, every bad thing somehow landed on my head.

At first Mom and Dad listened to my side. But after enough times, they stopped believing me entirely.

They decided I was a born liar.

I couldn't fight it with words, so I tried with actions.

But no matter how well-behaved I was, they read it as guilt.

They thought I was someone who'd grown up in the gutter and couldn't be trusted.

Back then, Linda's monthly allowance was over a million. To punish me, they gave me nothing.

I could only watch helplessly as Gran, the woman who'd kept me alive, died in agony from a terminal illness.

I begged them through tears to save her. They called me a scammer trying to squeeze money out of them.

This life? I was going to insult people, flip tables, and claim every last thing that belongs to me.

Everything that was mine had to be given back to me, all of it!

But Linda was clearly rattled.

The next day, Dad flew overseas for business. I checked myself out of the hospital alone and went back to the estate.

I barely stepped through the door when Linda grabbed me at the edge of the ground-floor pool.

The challenge in her eyes wasn't even hidden:

"Guess. If we both fall in, who do you think they'd save?"

I looked at the pool, three meters deep, and a chill moved through me.

In my previous life, she pushed me in. I nearly drowned, saved at the last second by a maid coming out to use the bathroom. I was left with fluid in my lungs and a cough that never went away.

Not this time.

She shoved me into the pool with everything she had. I dove straight to the bottom and swam to the far end underwater.

Linda was expecting to watch me thrash. One blink, and I was gone.

She craned her neck over the edge to look, and slipped right in, because I'd smeared the pool edge with lubricant beforehand.

I lay on the tile and watched her flail. What an idiot. I'd learned to swim.

Then Jason came sprinting from the side, screaming her name, desperate to get her out.

I narrowed my eyes. So it was a setup from the start.

It took them ten full minutes to haul Linda out.

She was shaking, terrified, and then suddenly dropped into a deep bow in front of me, eyes glistening.

"Sis, I was wrong. I'm so sorry. I'll make it right, I swear—"

I was bored. I wanted to walk away.

But Jason was staring at me, rage building behind his eyes like a wildfire.

"You—actually—tried—to—kill—her."

He grabbed a fistful of my hair from behind with one hand and wrenched me off my feet, hanging me in the air.

Then he forced my head underwater and held it there.

I stayed calm, held my breath, and played along.

Go ahead, the harder the better.

What felt like a century later, he pulled me back out.

He dumped me in front of Linda's hospital bed and kicked me.

"On your knees."

I curled up on the floor. Mom was right beside Linda's bed, looking at me like she hated me.

"The doctor said Linda nearly died. Severe suffocation. Pulmonary edema."

In my previous life, I was the one who'd nearly drowned. I ran a high fever and had nightmare after nightmare.

I kept mumbling, delirious: Linda pushed me. Linda pushed me.

And that kind of trauma, to them, was just a little "accident." Linda playing around, not watching where she was going.

I thought of that now, and I stroked the bruises on my body and started laughing.

"Serves her right. She deserves everything she got."

Mom raised her hand, but it stopped just short of my face.

"You—you—you're my own flesh and blood. My own daughter. And you're this vicious?"

Linda leaned against the headboard, coughing weakly.

"Mom, she only acts out because she wants your attention. I'm not upset with her."

Jason tensely fed Linda warm water and rubbed her chest to ease her breathing. "Linda, you're too good-hearted. That's why she keeps walking all over you."

Then he launched into a detailed account of how I had "attacked" Linda and pushed her into the pool.

Linda chimed in every so often to magnanimously "forgive" me.

What a performance. Really.

Mom held back her anger, her eyes cold on me.

"Since you're my daughter, I'll spare you. But starting now, you personally take care of Linda's every need, until she says she forgives you."

I went full crazy. "Fine. I'll take care of her right now."

I stood up, ripped out Linda's catheter, and threw the urine bag directly at her face.

Linda let out a blood-curdling shriek. "YOU BITCH—I'LL KILL YOU!"

That dropped the whole delicate, pitiful-little-flower routine real fast.

Jason's face twisted. He lunged at me again.

"You really dare—"

I spun, grabbed the nearest chair, and drove it straight into his crotch.

He doubled over instantly, tears shooting out of his eyes.

I laughed.

"Still want me to care for her?"

"Still want me to apologize?"

I leaned close to Linda's face. "I'll give you one chance. Tell the truth. Or trust me, I have all the ways in the world to cure your little 'illness.'"

Mom was full-on hyperventilating in the corner.

"God help me. You're hopeless. I actually regret bringing you back."

I smiled coldly.

Gran would never have imagined it.

The family she wanted so badly for me to come home to, the biological parents she made me search for, hated me this much.

Gran had scraped and starved to put me through school. Out before dawn every day, collecting trash off the streets in rain, snow, storms, never taking a day off.

My school fees, my textbooks, bus fare, food. She'd saved it all up cent by cent.

To feed me properly, she'd skipped her own breakfast and dinner, eating only once a day.

She starved herself down to skin and bone just to keep me healthy.

I loved her so much.

She used to tell me: when she found me, I was soft and milk-white, clearly a baby loved by her parents. She refused to let me lose what I was born with.

I used to clench my teeth and say: "They threw me away. They stopped being my parents the moment they did that. You're the only family I need, Gran."

She'd shake her head and smile, saying I was young and didn't understand yet.

But Gran, look at this. Your love was replaced a long time ago.

Linda caught Mom's expression shifting to her favor and immediately latched on like she had a shield.

"Mom, she really is trying to kill me. I'm scared. Can you ask Dad to make her leave?"

Mom was visibly repulsed by the smell all over Linda but couldn't not comfort her.

"Just wait. I'm calling your father right now to deal with this."

"Today we are removing that thing from the Veil family for good."

Linda's eyes lit up, vicious and delighted. But her face kept that same perfect wide-eyed innocence.

Dad arrived shortly after.

No questions. Two slaps across my face.

"Didn't I tell you last time? Why are you still treating your sister this way?"

"You may be the biological daughter, but the Veil family has standards. We don't tolerate this kind of abuse."

I smiled coldly. Same script as last time.

Day one back in this family, and Linda had already started with the crying and the injuries.

I never knew when I'd have a new crime pinned on me.

Two lifetimes of being framed, humiliated, and left to die. The rage burned through me like wildfire.

I let my smile spread slowly across my face as I looked at each of them in turn.

"Mom. Watch closely and see who the real manipulator is."

"Dad. Open your eyes and look at the Veil family's precious 'standards.'"

"Jason. You're an idiot."

"And you, Linda, I hope you can keep up the performance after today."

Then I pressed the button for the surveillance system I'd planted throughout the house.