Her voice dropped. “Then where is the money?”
“I gave it away,” I said. “Every cent. Donated.”
The room went silent, the kind of stillness that buzzes in your ears before a storm. Then her hand was in my hair, yanking my head back until pain tore through my scalp.
“You vile little ingrate!” she screamed. “So this is who you really are. You’ve been pretending all these years!”
I clenched my jaw and stared straight back at her. “You’re the one pretending. You played the loving mother, acted like you cared about me—”
Her slap came so hard my vision burst with light.
Then another. And another. The blows kept coming. By the fifth, my ears were roaring. By the tenth, I could taste blood. She didn’t stop until she’d struck me over and over, until I couldn’t even keep count anymore.
All the while, Nathaniel—hiding behind his brother’s name—stood nearby and watched.
“She deserves it,” he said flatly. “Delilah told me everything. How you ruined the auction and tried to hurt her. You even stole the spotlight from her painting.”
My legs finally gave way. I collapsed onto the floor, palms pressed to the carpet, breath tearing painfully through my chest. No one moved to help. No one intervened.