Chapter 288: 288/Flashback (21)
Chapter 288: The Genesis of a Monster
Flashback – 23 Years Ago
Author POV
Violet looked with cold, merciless detachment at the form of Elizabeth, who had completely collapsed onto the cold wooden floor. The poor woman was shaking, writhing, and sobbing as if her throat were being slit from ear to ear, but this sickening sight didn’t touch a single fiber in Violet’s hardened heart. Curving her lips into a mocking smirk filled with utter contempt, she said in a flat tone that carried a mountain of indifference: "Don’t point your fingers of blame and accusation at me, you fool... go and blame your precious husband."
Elizabeth raised her head with extreme slowness, as though carrying mountains upon her neck. Her long golden hair was scattered hysterically over her pale, tear-drenched face. With trembling, blue-tinted lips and eyes red as burning coals, she screamed in a tone overflowing with oppression: "You’re a liar! You’re the one who seduced him with your cheap ways and dragged him into your filth, you thieving whore!"
Violet let out a mocking, sharp, and ringing laugh that shattered the suffocating silence of the room, waving her hand in the air with sheer dismissiveness: "My, what a truly miserable and pathetic woman you are!" Then, turning her entire body, she sharpened her piercing gaze toward Thomas, who stood frozen in the corner of the room. Locking her defiant eyes onto him, she said with a decisive, unarguable strictness: "The show ends here, Thomas. Don’t you dare touch your phone to call me ever again for the rest of your life."
Thomas didn’t hesitate for a single second in making his choice. He lunged his massive frame toward her with a frantic speed, like a blind man sprinting toward his only lifeline. The terror of losing her before the eyes of his stunned, broken wife overthrew him. Grabbing Violet’s arms tightly with both hands, he cried out with a desperate, cheap, and disgraceful plea: "Violet, please don’t leave! I am ready to do anything anything you ask for in this world, for you and you alone!"
Elizabeth remained on her knees on the hard floor, watching this sickening display in a state of violent shock that completely paralyzed her movement and silenced her tongue, which failed to utter a rejection of this ultimate humiliation.
Violet smiled with deep malice, tilting her head to the side as she contemplated his groveling with amused eyes: "And what on earth could you do more than what you’ve already done, Thomas? You are already a married man, and you have two children waiting for you at your house."
Thomas squeezed her fingers with even greater force, answering without blinking, his eyes gleaming with the flash of a blind madness that demolished every ounce of sanity in his head: "I’ll divorce her... I’ll divorce her immediately and throw her out of my life, and then I’ll marry you! I will do anything that crosses your mind, Violet, just to have you with me and by my side forever!"
In that precise moment, and because of those toxic words, Elizabeth’s soul died completely while she was still alive. His words caught in her chest, suffocating her breath; she had never expected or imagined that the man she loved like crazy, the one for whom she had turned her back on the entire world and her family, would discard her so simply and easily for a passing woman.
Violet gave a faint, mocking hum and pushed his hands away with coldness: "Hmm... a wonderful and impressive sacrifice, Thomas. But unfortunately, I have absolutely no intention of being a stepmother to someone else’s kids... I simply hate children and cannot stand their whining. Goodbye, darling."
Turning with immense pride, Violet crossed the threshold of the house with fast, confident steps. In her mind, she was thanking God fervently for her excellent luck; she had rid herself of Thomas’s suffocating pursuit in a clever way, utilizing the confrontation without having to fabricate fake excuses.
Meanwhile, back in the apartment, Thomas moved in a random, hysterically angry manner from her rejection. He began gathering his scattered clothes, throwing on the remaining pieces in a blind, mindless rush. Then he ran like a maniac out into the hallway to catch up with Violet, shutting his ears entirely to his wife’s screams and wails, leaving Elizabeth behind, cast face-down on the floor like a worthless, lifeless corpse that meant absolutely nothing to him.
There, amidst the killing and desolate silence of the apartment, the naked truth seeped into Elizabeth’s bones with sheer horror: Thomas had never loved her a single day in her life. Though she had seen the signs of his cold rejection throughout the past years and chose, with a stupid willingness, to believe the opposite just to keep going, the truth today slapped her face with brutal force. It was something she could no longer deny or escape from at all.
She remained frozen like a sheet of ice for a long time, losing all track of hours. Finally, she forced her trembling body up, rising with immense difficulty like an old woman in the autumn of her life. Wiping her hot tears with her shaking palms, she walked with unstable steps back to the grand house where her young children resided. The moment she saw them, she plastered a faint, fake smile across her deathly pale face to protect them, and prepared their dinner... which would be their last supper together in this world.
She led them gently to their warm rooms, tucking them into their beds with supreme kindness and tenderness, kissing their foreheads. Then, with steady, cold steps, she headed toward Thomas’s office specifically toward his private iron safe. Stretching her trembling hand out, she pulled the black firearm from it. The existence of another woman in Thomas’s life was the one thing her body could not breathe or live through, because she loved him in a morbid, destructive way... she loved him more than herself, and more even than her children, whom she left sleeping.
Walking down the stairs to the lower floor with a body as cold as the dead, she sat on a chair, waiting for him in the pitch-black darkness for several hours. Finally, she heard the latch of the exterior door click softly, and Thomas walked in, carrying his disappointment.
When he stood before her, flicked the light on, and stated with a ruthless, unforgiving harshness that he loved Violet and could not live without her, she didn’t utter a single word. Instead, she drew the weapon from behind her back with lightning speed, aimed the barrel directly at her temple, and pulled the trigger. A bullet detonated like a thunderclap through the house, and her body fell lifeless, writhing in a pool of blood on the floor.
Thomas froze in his tracks like a stone statue, his eyes widening in pure terror as his mouth went dry. Never in his worst nightmares did he expect Elizabeth’s life to end in suicide. He expected her to cry, scream, or demand a divorce and take his money, but for her to end her life so simply right before his eyes was an impossibility that had never crossed his mind.
Meanwhile, her youngest son, little Robert, was standing at the railing of the upper floor, watching the scene from above with eyes wide from panic. With a racing, terrified heart, he had listened to every bit of the fierce argument that took place between them, and he saw with his own innocent childhood eyes his mother shoot herself. Dashing down the steps with his small, shaking body, he let out a hysterical scream that ripped through the silence of the mansion: "Mom... Mom! Please wake up!"
He threw his entire small weight over her extended body, shaking her shoulders with his tiny, trembling hands, trying to rouse her from this sudden sleep, while the thick, warm blood gushed abundantly from her head, leaving a dark crimson pool that expanded around them and stained his clothes.
Thomas advanced with trembling steps, nearly falling, attempting to forcefully pull his young son, Robert, off the warm corpse to calm him. But in that terrifying moment, the eldest son, Harold, woke up to the sound of the echoing gunshot and the continuous screaming. He began walking down the stairs with slow, stumbling steps, rubbing his eyes with his fingers, saying in a sleepy, confused voice: "What are all these annoying noises?"
But the boy’s steps froze suddenly halfway down the staircase when his eyes landed on his mother cast in the middle of a pool of blood, and his brother Robert crying and screaming over her with a horrific wail. Harold advanced very slowly, his childhood mind completely refusing to comprehend or believe the hideous sight before him. He knelt beside her on his small knees, stretching his cold hand to touch her face, which had begun to lose its warmth, saying in a strange, calm, and emotionless tone: "Mom, get up... look, Dad is finally home. Come on, make him dinner like you always do... Dad is here, get up."
Thomas screamed in a booming, hoarse, and cracked voice, pulling Robert back with brute force: "Harold! Go to your room upstairs right now and don’t look down here!"
But little Robert wrenched himself away with a wild, fierce strength, cleverly breaking free from his father’s grip to fall onto his mother’s blood-soaked body once more. He cried out with a wail that would tear the hardest of hearts: "Mom... the ambulance is coming right now... please hold on, Mom, don’t leave me!"
Thomas was the only person in that room who knew with absolute certainty that she had departed this life and would never return. In fact, even his young children knew it in their darkened depths, but they chose, with a terrifying denial and fear of reality, not to acknowledge it. Harold looked with glassy, dull eyes at Robert, saying with a chilling numbness: "Why are you crying and asking for an ambulance? Mom isn’t sick, she’s just sleeping from exhaustion." Harold was in a state of complete psychological shock that paralyzed his emotions, dealing with the corpse in a dry, terrifyingly detached manner.
As for little Robert, who had witnessed every single detail from the very beginning, and knew with full awareness that his mother had committed suicide in cold blood because of his father’s betrayal and cruelty his childhood gaze suddenly morphed into deep-seated malice and pure evil. He extended his small, trembling hand toward the black weapon lying beside the palm of his dead mother.
He lifted it with both of his tiny hands despite its heavy weight. Then, standing with a shaking body and eyes burning with hellfire, he aimed the barrel directly at his father Thomas’s chest, yelling in a booming voice choked with tears and raw venom: "You are the reason for all of this! You’re the one who killed my mother with your words and actions... and now, you’re going to die!"
Thomas took a swift step back, his limbs trembling, raising his hands to appease the boy in a genuine fear of death: "Robert... son, calm down and put the weapon down!"
But little Robert’s finger, packed with absolute venom, pressed down on the trigger with force and resolve. The second booming gunshot exploded, tearing through his father’s body.
Thomas fell to the floor from his injury, drowning in his own fresh, crimson blood right beside his suicidal wife.
