Chapter 563: The items in the box

After Viola was left alone, the weariness in her bones became so overwhelming that she grew sleepy and couldn’t help but lie down for a nap. Her drowsy eyes drifted toward the view outside, where the snowfall had eased that morning and the sun hung in the sky, its rays reflecting off the glass wall and spilling into the room.

She was glad the curtains hadn’t been drawn completely, allowing her to see outside. She gazed at the sky, letting her mind wander lazily, even though a few thoughts lingered at the back of her mind.

She wondered faintly why she had felt pain in her stomach earlier and hoped Sebastian would handle the Darkbur Pack before they caused them any trouble. Then she wondered what was taking Ivy so long to return.

Before long, she drifted off to sleep, her gaze still resting on the view outside.

Nonetheless, just as she was drifting into a deep slumber, she shifted on the bed, knocking the box she had kept beside her onto the floor, and the sound of it crashing instantly woke her up.

Viola sat up on her bed in alarm, for a moment not knowing what had made the sound and wondering if it was another invasion alarm, until she noticed the box that had fallen and opened, spilling everything inside it onto the floor. Her heart pricked, thinking she might have broken something precious.

She moved away from the bed, and knowing that bending down was almost impossible in her bone-weary state and condition, she went down and sat on the floor with her back resting against the bed.

Viola had wanted to wait until her sister was here to check whatever was stored in the box, but as she found its contents scattered on the floor, she reached to right the box and began to pick the items up one after another to look at them. She first picked up a folded picture, unfolding it to see a picture of her father, grinning and holding a boy on his shoulder, who she instantly knew was Gilbert from his hair and eye color.

Just as she had seen before, Vincent, her father was a very handsome man, and looking at her father’s well-kept picture, it almost seemed like he could still be alive. She touched his face with her fingers, imagining what life would have been like had they grown up knowing the man.

She wouldn’t have spent half her life longing for a real family and a normal home. Perhaps, if her parents had been there, she would have learned so much from them, including how to handle the anxiety of becoming a mother herself. Instead, she was facing motherhood without any guidance, having never been around many pups or experienced what it was like to grow up with a loving pair of parents.

She wished her mother were still alive, or even her father. She wished at least one of them had lived long enough to be there for her, to guide her through this new Chapter of her life. Her throat tightened, and she swallowed hard, overwhelmed by a longing for the parents she had never truly known. It felt foolish to miss them so much when she was already heavily pregnant and about to become a parent herself, but she couldn’t help it.

"I wish I knew you and what you were like, Dad," she murmured to the photograph.

Viola immediately decided she would put the picture in a bigger frame and hang it somewhere her pups would see it and know their grandfather. She had always wanted a family of her own to show off, and she was glad she could show him to her children.

Viola put the picture back in the box and picked up a gold ring, turning it over in her palm and wondering if it had belonged to her father. She admired it and also put it away in the box.

She reached out for every single item in it until there was one last one. It was something like a silver chain locket necklace, and she picked it up, smiling as she pulled it open and found tiny pictures of her mother and father on both sides of the love locket.

Now that she looked at the locket necklace, she could recall always seeing it around her father’s neck in her mother’s memories of him in her grave.

Viola was basking in the fact that they had loved each other, and was thinking of having such a locket made for herself and her husband to hold, when she noticed something about the locket.

It felt heavy for a chain holding just tiny pictures, almost as if the locket held a stone in it, and she looked closely at it out of curiosity, turning it around in her palm, when it slipped from her hand and fell to the floor, breaking off another section that sprang open.

Viola’s heart shattered at the thought that she had ruined the locket, but when she picked it up, she saw it hadn’t broken. Another section had simply opened in it, and in that section it held the strangest, tiniest bottle she had ever seen in her life.

She picked it up, seeing the blue liquid moving inside the small thing. "What is this?" She wondered, turning it around until she figured out an opening and screwed it loose, and immediately smoke began to emit from it.

For such a small bottle, Viola thought, it was making quite a lot of smoke, and she wanted to close it up immediately and return it. But soon the smoke got into her nose and she began to sneeze repeatedly, her eyes watering and burning as she couldn’t control her reaction to the smell.

A tiny drop of the blue liquid fell onto her hand as she kept sneezing, and immediately the skin there turned blue, growing scales like those of a mermaid and spreading to her forearm, and Viola’s eyes fell on it, widening in dread.