Olivia Sparks

"You joined them too?" Amelia's voice was shaky. She touched her neck, massaging it in circles to relieve it from the lump that seemed to never go away.

She looked at Olivia and couldn't believe that her daughter followed in her footsteps. A sense of pride coursed through Amelia but quickly vanished upon seeing Olivia's blank eyes staring at her. 

Unnerved by it, she looked away, in denial of the fact that every time she looked at Olivia's pool of hazel, who she saw instead was Henry Lin.

"They found me, yes. But it was my decision to join them. Nobody forced me or anything. If that's what you're worried about," Olivia flatly stated. Waving her little recorder, Olivia urged her mother to speak.

"Oh, your question. Right. Hmmm, that night, I was on my way home after meeting with the king and it was raining. I just saw a bright light flashing ahead of us and then there was this hot, consuming fire. I blacked out and when I woke up, it was more than a year after the accident."

The entire time Amelia was speaking, Olivia was sneaking glances at her and noticed that the former's fingers were shaking nonstop. In her thoughts, Olivia thought of what might cause such tremors. Was it the drugs in her mother's system or the memory of that night was still haunting her mother?

Soon enough, Olivia was snapped out from her trance when she heard her mother call out her name.

"Olivia," Amelia almost whispered her name.  "The… the evidence… Sebastian has it. If you're looking for that, the royal family has it for sure."

"That's good to hear." Olivia pressed the red button again and stopped the recording. 

That's all she needed to send as proof to free her mother from an interrogation from the Pyxis. The truth was, she was hesitant to do it, but the last thing she wanted to see would be a group of hyenas circling a disoriented Amelia. After all, her mother used to be a candidate as headmistress, had not the accident happened. 

"Do you really wish to go back to the Lin Estate?" Olivia asked, her head bowed down. She didn't want to see the truth in her mother's eyes, but she had to confirm everything so she could move on herself.

Olivia dramatically scoffed. "Ha! He locked you up for twenty-plus years and when you're finally freed, you wanted to run back to him. I don't get it. It's like you're pulling tricks on me. On us."

"He did it for me. I had no sense of time when I woke up. I was confused and depressed over your… death, which isn't the case now that I can see you happy and healthy." Amelia defended Henry that Olivia had to take a sharp breath, filling her entire body with enough air so she won't get dizzy with her mother's reasoning.

She scanned her mother's face but saw nothing but a woman who was left an empty shell after years of captivity and drug abuse. 

Olivia choked. She tried to hold the tears in her eyes but it fell on its accord, streaming down her face like a waterfall. And even with the tears clouding her vision, she could see clearly that the woman before her was no longer the Amelia Lin that people knew and talked about.

Speaking through her sobs, she bared herself in front of her mother. "That's my birthday wish growing up—for you to wake up so you would come and find me. Every year I would whisper the same thing. But you never came. Not dad. Not even Ollie. So I stopped wishing for it because I knew it would never happen. And when I finally had the courage to come home and I saw you for the first time, I found myself praying at night for the day that you will finally wake up."

"It was my birthday," Olivia paused when she felt something lodged in her throat. Forcing it down, she continued, "It was my birthday when I saw you get up from your bed and kneeled in front of Henry Lin like he was some kind of god. And do you know what else happened that day? It was also the day he sold my hand for marriage as if I am a livestock.

"None of everything that he did hurt me because I'm used to him disregarding my very existence and how he hated me for simply breathing.

"But you know what hurt me the most? It's when you said that after all the things he did to you, you still wanted to come back to him all because you wanted a complete family."

Wiping the tears on her cheeks with her knuckles, Olivia stood up and was about to leave when Amelia spoke.

"Hear me out, Olivia. Wait."

Turning on her heel to face her mother, Olivia heaved a defeated sigh. She really didn't want to listen, but something told her to give her mother another chance, so she did. 

Scrunching her nose, she lent an ear, but regret filled her entire being the longer she listened to Amelia.

"That day… when you said you caught me kneeling… I know it was the same day of the accident and I did that because I was asking for your father's forgiveness. I ruined our family once when I made the mistake of giving Sebastian those files that would incriminate your father. I thought what I was doing was for everybody's best interest, for the country's interest, but after waking up from a coma, and finding out that I lost you, I realized that I should have put my family first before everything else."

"But you didn't lose me, Mother. Henry Lin shipped me as far away as he could and locked you up. You don't owe him an apology. He owed us an apology, which we both knew we would never get."

"He sent you away to keep you safe," Amelia rebutted, clutching her hands over her c.h.e.s.t.

Seeing no point in arguing with her mother, Olivia paused and exhaled through her nose with her eyes closed as the stories of Amelia's glory days were flushed down to the drain.

And when Olivia opened her eyes that showed nothing but grief for her mother, she fished her phone out from her purse, dialing a number she never thought she'd call. 

Olivia gritted her teeth as she waited for the other person to pick up her call. And once it got through, it didn't take a second for Olivia to break the news, "Prepare the cabin. Your prisoner is coming back tonight."