Chapter 311: The Dark Room

"But Aira wants to ride horsie!"

The little girl threw both arms around Lara’s leg, pressing her cheek against it as she whined.

"Horsie! Get down!"

Aiden joined in, smacking Lara’s thigh with his tiny palm.

"Get down! Get down!"

Lara looked down at the two children clinging to her.

For a moment, she said nothing.

She wanted to refuse.

Every muscle in her body ached from the mission she had just returned from. Her limbs felt heavy, her head was still swimming with exhaustion, and all she wanted was to lie down somewhere quiet and close her eyes.

But she knew what would happen if the twins started crying.

If they complained to their mother...

Lara slowly exhaled.

Then she lowered herself to the floor, first onto her knees, then onto her hands.

"Fine."

The twins’ faces immediately brightened. Their tears vanished as though they had never existed.

"Yay!"

Aiden grabbed a toy whip from the floor. Aira reached for another.

They scrambled onto her back, their little bodies bouncing against her sore muscles.

"Go!"

The toy whip cracked against Lara’s back.

"Faster, horsie!"

Another playful smack landed on her shoulder.

The twins dissolved into squeals of laughter.

Lara clenched her jaw and crawled forward.

One hand, moved, then the other. Her movements were sluggish. Her palms dragged against the cold floor.

"So slow," Aident complained.

"Faster," Aira slapped her side, harder this time.

She managed barely half a meter.

Her arms trembled violently beneath her and the toddler’s weight.

Just a little farther.

She tried to move again. But her strength was gone.

Her elbows buckled. She collapsed.

The twins tumbled from her back and landed on the floor beside her.

For one brief second, the room fell completely silent.

Lara couldn’t move.

Her cheek pressed against the floor. Her vision blurred, and a strange ringing filled her ears.

Then the twins began to cry.

Lara heard their voices growing louder and louder, but she couldn’t lift her head. She couldn’t even tell them she was not all right.

Darkness crept into the edges of her vision. Then everything disappeared.

When Lara finally opened her eyes again, she was no longer in the room.

She was in the dark room again.

Alone.

The heavy door was shut.

Locked from the outside.

The familiar darkness pressed in around her, swallowing the faint light that slipped through the tiny gap beneath the door.

Lara slowly curled herself against the wall. She already knew why she was there.

She hurt the twins.

That was all that mattered. It didn’t matter that Lara had been exhausted.

It didn’t matter that she had just returned from another mission, her body pushed far beyond its limits.

It didn’t matter that she had never wanted to play in the first place.

None of that mattered.

Aiden and Aira had fallen.

And in Marian’s eyes, that made Lara guilty.

So she was punished.

Fine.

At least here, no one would ask anything of her.

No one would order her to move, to smile, to play, or to take care of the twins.

She could finally sleep.

Lara lowered her head onto her knees and closed her eyes. Her aching back rested against the cold wall, the chill seeping through her clothes.

For the first time since returning from her mission, she didn’t have to force herself to stay awake.

She could simply rest.

And strangely enough, Lara was almost grateful for the silence.

...

Outside the locked door, the world would continue as though nothing happened.

But inside the darkness, Lara was left with the same lesson she had learned over and over again:

No matter how much it hurt, she was never allowed to say no.

And if she failed to obey, she would always be the one who paid the price.

Her mother, Marian, had never struck her.

Her weapon had always been her words.

Cold and cutting words. Words that lingered long after the scolding had stopped and everyone else had gone to sleep.

Lara would have preferred a slap.

At least, a slap left a sting that eventually faded. Even the pain of a belt across her back had an ending.

But Marian’s words did not.

They stayed. They followed Lara into bed at night and found their way into her nightmare. They waited for her when she woke in the morning. They made her question every mistake, every tear, every breath she took too loudly.

And when words were no longer enough, there was the dark room.

Marian would lock her inside and leave her there alone.

There were no windows. Not even a single lamp, nor cracks in the walls through which sunlight could reach her.

Nothing. Only absolute darkness.

In the beginning, Lara cried whenever the door closed. She screamed for her mother and begged to be let out. She pounded her little fists against the door until her knuckles hurt.

Eventually, she stopped.

There was no point.

In that darkness, Lara often wondered if she was really Marian’s daughter.

One day, she finally found the courage to ask.

Marian had stared at her with those same cold, unfeeling eyes.

"Of course," she said. "Whose daughter do you think you are if not ours?"

The answer should have reassured Lara.

Instead, somehow, it made her feel even more alone.

Then the twins were born.

And for the first time, Lara understood just how differently a child could be loved.

Aiden and Aira were cherished.

They were fussed over when they cried, praised when they smiled, and indulged whenever they wanted something.

Lara watched it all from the side, quietly absorbing every difference.

She couldn’t help but love them, too.

They were her little siblings.

She carried them when they wanted to be carried. She played with them when they wanted to play. She gave in to their demands even when her own body was already trembling with exhaustion.

And somehow, even that became another reason for her punishment.

Whenever one of the twins cried while Lara was nearby, Marian blamed her.

Sometimes it was because Lara hadn’t entertained them enough.

Sometimes because she had refused them something.

Sometimes there was no reason at all.

It was always Lara’s fault.

And so the dark room became familiar.

Lara would be dragged inside, the door would close, and darkness would swallow her whole.

She had no way of knowing whether she had been there for an hour or an entire day.

There was no sunlight to mark the passing of time, no clock to tell her when morning had become night.

So she found her own ways to endure it.

Before she was even seven, Lara had memorized addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division tables simply to keep her mind occupied.

When those became too easy, she moved on to more complicated mathematics.

Cubes. Square roots. Quadratic equations.

She learned because there was nothing else to do.

The darkness had taken away her sense of time, but it could not take away her mind.

And as Lara grew older, another truth became impossible to ignore.

Her parents’ favoritism only became more pronounced.

The twins were their children.

Lara was something else.

Something useful.

Something they had expectations for.

When she was old enough to finally ask her father why, Artemio gave her an answer that would change the way she saw her family forever.

He told her about the blood feud.

His firstborn son from his first marriage had been killed.

And Artemio wanted revenge. He wanted someone to carry his hatred forward.

That someone was Lara.

She spent her childhood wondering why her parents never seemed to love her the way they loved the twins.

She finally understood.

They hadn’t raised her to be their daughter.

They raised her to be a weapon for revenge.

And perhaps that was why, no matter how hard Lara tried, she could never earn the kind of love her siblings received.

Aiden and Aira were born to be loved.

Lara was born to be forged as a weapon.