Something flickered behind his eyes, like a thought catching up to him. Then came the disappointment, cold and total. He didn't look at me again.

My mother had believed the Hardings came for her out of love. Out of blood.

She was naive. I wasn't.

A family like the Hardings ran full medical panels every year.

How could they possibly go thirty-eight years without discovering the daughter raised under their roof wasn't theirs?

They'd lost her for thirty-eight years and never once came looking.

When they finally did, there had to be a reason they didn't want anyone to know.

My gaze settled on the sickly girl. Cold. Assessing.

She was the reason.

Lindsay helped Caroline to her feet, the older woman still whimpering in agony.

Then Lindsay dropped to her knees in front of Max, tears streaming down her face like rain on cherry blossoms:

"Grandpa, she just lost her mother. She's hurting. She wants someone to take it out on, and that's understandable. Please don't blame her!"

"After all, Mom and I are the ones who took her mother's and her aunt's place all these years. We deserve this."

"Please don't hit her. If you have to hit someone, hit me!"

"Just please, don't make yourself sick over this!"

While she spoke, she gave Caroline's sleeve a subtle tug.

Caroline caught the signal, shot me one last venomous glare, then gritted her teeth and joined in begging for mercy on my behalf.

She even slipped in, between the lines, that the recording I'd played was fabricated. That I'd framed her.

Max swallowed every word. He rushed to pull Lindsay up, his face crumpling with tenderness:

"You sweet girl. Always too kind for your own good, begging for someone like her."

"Grandpa would never lay a hand on you!"

"Your kidneys are weak. You should be resting, not coming downstairs."

I caught the key phrase: kidneys are weak.

Everything clicked into place.

My mother's kidneys hadn't been a match. So she died.

Mine were. So they brought me here.

Max waved his hand, signaling the bodyguards to seize me:

"Grab this feral animal and hold her down! She's going to kneel before the young miss and bow until her forehead bleeds!"

"Then throw her in the basement. No food. Let her think about what she's done!"

At his command, the bodyguards cracked their knuckles and lunged.

I rolled my neck. Every cell in my body was screaming with anticipation.

What they didn't know was that I'd been diagnosed with a severe psychiatric condition. Antisocial personality disorder, compounded by violent tendencies.

Without my mother nagging me to behave, I didn't have to hold back anymore.

It was over fast. The smugness drained from their faces, replaced by disbelief, then horror.

The bodyguards lay crumpled on the floor with broken hands and shattered legs, sobbing and howling.

I'd taken hits too, but I couldn't feel a thing.

I licked the blood from the corner of my mouth, grabbed Caroline by the hair with one hand and closed the other around Lindsay's throat.

One kick sent them both crashing to their knees in front of me. I shoved their heads down, forcing them to kowtow over and over.

Anyone who made a sound got slapped.

Max's lips turned purple. He clutched his chest, his heart condition flaring.

Madeline's face twisted with anguish. She raised her cane and swung it at me.

"Stop it! Stop it this instant!"

"The apple doesn't fall far from the tree! You're as vicious as your mother. You dare lay hands on my precious daughter and granddaughter right in front of me!"

"I'll do what your mother should have done and beat some sense into you, you wild little wretch!"

I snatched the cane out of the air an inch before it cracked my skull. Madeline lost her balance and collapsed onto the floor.

I turned the cane around and brought it down hard across Caroline's back.

The bruise it left was identical to the marks on my mother's corpse.

I scoffed, then pressed the tip of the cane against Madeline's sternum, looming over her:

"You miserable old hag."

"When my mother came back, is this the same cane you used to 'teach her a lesson'?"

Madeline froze. Something complicated passed across her face:

"Your mother was vicious. She picked up all sorts of filthy habits out there, and the moment she came home she started bullying Caroline and Lindsay."

"I'm her mother! Disciplining her, teaching her manners, that's my God-given right!"

I almost laughed from the sheer rage.

If someone told me my mother had killed a person, I'd believe it.

But bullying someone? Absolutely impossible.

"Manners?"

I drove the cane harder into her chest.

"Your idea of manners for the biological daughter you owed thirty-eight years to was torturing her to death and tossing her body out like a dead dog?"

Her pupils dilated. The color drained from her face.

"What do you mean tortured to death? What do you mean tossed her body out?"

I raised an eyebrow.

Her expression seemed genuinely ignorant.

Madeline was about to press further when Caroline rushed in, clutching an unconscious Lindsay in her arms, wailing at the top of her lungs.

"Lindsay! My baby!"

"Call an ambulance!"

The whole place erupted into chaos.

Ambulances screamed up the driveway and carted off a full load of casualties.

My first day at the Harding residence: the butler's hand was broken, and an entire squad of bodyguards had shattered hands and legs.

Caroline's ten fingers were snapped. Lindsay, thrown into shock, had gone into kidney failure.

Max suffered a heart attack. Madeline's blood pressure spiked until she collapsed.

The whole family, neat and tidy, checked into the hospital.

In the vast, empty mansion, only a housekeeper remained, kneeling before me, slamming her forehead against the floor until blood streaked down her face, begging for mercy.

"Miss, I've told you everything I know!"

"If you don't believe me, check the security cameras!"

I followed the direction of her trembling finger and looked up. A dark little device blinked with a red light.

Fury shot straight to the top of my skull.

One look at the footage would have been enough to tear apart Caroline and Lindsay's pathetic frame job.

But nobody bothered to check. They just took those two at their word and decided my mother was the vicious one, the one trying to hurt them.

Following the housekeeper's account, I made my way to the basement.

The cramped, lightless room reeked of mold and the metallic stench of old blood.

Iron chains as thick as fingers lay in a careless heap in the corner. The floor was covered in patches of blackened stains.

A leather whip hung nearby, crusted with dried blood gone dark.

During the single month my mother spent back in this house, this was where they'd kept her. Chained up in this basement. Flayed raw with that whip.

I claimed Caroline's luxury suite for myself and lay down on the soft bed.

Neither my mother nor I had ever lived in a house this grand or slept on a bed this soft.

Early the next morning, two figures barged into the room.

Madeline's cane struck the floor in sharp, staccato beats.

"You! Who gave you permission to steal Caroline's room? Greedy, just like your mother!"

I got out of bed, taking my time, my voice cold as frost.

"Steal?"

"This belonged to my mother. Now it belongs to me."

Max barked his order, barely containing himself.

"Enough with the lip! Lindsay's gone into kidney failure because of you. Get to the hospital and donate your kidney to her. Now!"

The entitlement on his face was laughable.

"If there's something wrong with your head, go see a doctor."

"Why would I ever give a kidney to the daughter of the woman who murdered my mother?"

Caroline, who'd been lurking outside the door, burst in too, sobbing and begging me to save her daughter. But her eyes were pure venom.

Madeline's brow furrowed.

"Your mother brought it on herself! She tried to hurt Caroline and fell to her own death!"

"Her death had nothing to do with Caroline!"

"My mother brought it on herself? Tried to hurt Caroline?"

I closed the distance between us, one step at a time.

"How exactly did she try to hurt her?"

Madeline's eyes filled with disappointment.

"The moment she came back, she got jealous and deliberately smashed a glass of water Caroline had kindly poured for her. Scalded Caroline's hands."

"Oh? That's what she did?"

I seized Caroline by the arm, sliced through the thick layers of gauze wrapped around her hand with a knife, and pressed the cup of boiling water the trembling housekeeper handed over right into her palm.

She shrieked as the scalding water hit her skin, flinging the cup on reflex. It struck Max square in the face, and he howled in pain.

Madeline turned on me, furious.

"You! Caroline's hand is injured because of you. How could she possibly hold a cup that hot?!"

I let out a cold laugh.

"My mother's left hand had three fingers hacked off. Two fingers on her right hand were permanently crippled. She couldn't even hold a pair of chopsticks steady."

"But she was supposed to keep a firm grip on the scalding cup Caroline handed her?"

Madeline clapped a hand over her mouth, her voice breaking.

"How... how is that possible? Who did that to her?"

I pointed at Caroline.

"Her birth mother. Your former nanny."

Madeline's legs buckled. She staggered back two steps, mumbling under her breath.

"No... that's impossible..."

"She didn't even know your mother wasn't her real daughter. Why would she..."

I narrowed my eyes and cut her off, my voice ice.

"Kidney matching has the highest success rate between blood relatives. Want to know why I'm a match for Lindsay?"

She froze, confused by the sudden shift.

"W-why?"

Some sins deserved to be dragged into the light.

"Because I'm actually—"

I was about to say it when Caroline scrambled up from the floor and screamed over me.