Dumped By My Husband, I Became A Billionaire Heiress

Her world began spinning, and the room became claustrophobic and too small for her. She had difficulty breathing. A sister—someone she didn't know, a sister who disappeared but didn't totally go. The more she thought about it, the more her legs weakened, and her hands shaken at this shocking revelation.

"How does this make sense? This sentence escaped her lips in barely a whisper. Her father's hands trembled, his eyes filled with a mixture of sadness and fear. He took a deep breath, his fingers playing with the blanket and thinking of the next thing to say.

"It's complicated, Lizzy, I don't think you're ready to hear this story."

However, she was done with secrets, half-truths and scanty explanations. "Daddy, I need the truth right now. Tell me everything I need to know about this."

The machines used to check his vitals took their turns making sounds when there was no human voice. He turned aside, looking at the window. "From the moment she was born, Sophia was different, your mother called her unique, an enigma that no one understood."

"How was she different?" she pressed, frowning and remembering her name - Sophia, a name she couldn't put a face to. She kept thinking about that moment, being so furious and frustrated.

His head and hands began to shake as he continued. "She was not like other kids. She knew a lot of things. Saw a lot of things. Importantly, they were things no child should ever come across or know." His voice immediately reduced to a whisper. "We thought... we thought we could protect her or everyone."

A chill ran down her spine again. With the way he talked, she realized it was not just about any missing child. It was something darker and deeper, something that would hurt more than a heart attack.

"Okay. What happened?" her voice cracked when the words eventually came out after deliberating asking to know more.

He then closed his eyes, trying to control the tears, but it was too late as they came down effortlessly. "We didn't send her away. She... left. Or rather, she was taken. But not in the way you might think."

The room, which was getting hotter, started becoming colder all of a sudden, and she noticed her father's monitors flickering slightly as if they responded to the emotional weight of his words.

"When Sophia was twelve, strange things started happening. Objects moving without being touched. Whispers in empty rooms. Your mother would find drawings that were intricate, terrifying drawings that no child could create." He paused, his breath catching. "We consulted everyone. Doctors. Priests. Even people who claimed to understand... extraordinary abilities."

Just then, she remembered the bracelet, and she has been trying to reconcile all the information her dad had given her to that bracelet. "Then, the bracelet?" she asked, gently and softly.

His face went pale and indifferent. "A reminder. A connection."

Before he could talk more about it, a nurse who was assigned to him came in to monitor his vitals and check how he was doing, making the moment shattered, the intimacy of their conversation interrupted by the clinic intervention. Lizzy watched with frustration building in her mind, the conversation that they just built, was delayed by another rather important thing to be done.

After ten minutes, the nurse left and dropped a deafening silence. "Can we continue? What happened?"

He stared back at her, truly looking at the eyes he had avoided for some minutes, and for the second time, she saw something she had never seen before in his eyes. Unadulterated and pure fear staring back at her in the eyes.

"Some truths are better left buried," he whispered again, avoiding her eyes and taking them back to the window which showed a man diligently watering the flowers in the little garden.

Lizzy didn't want to give up on this. He could not just tell her half the secret and leave the rest for her to figure out or imagine.

"I'm not a child anymore," she said, her voice firm and steady. "I want to hear everything, whatever happened with Sophia, I need to know every bit of it!"

He didn't respond and she knew that silence was a huge response from him. Each passing second felt like an eternity, loaded with unspoken pain, with very heavy memories to bear, but she decided to wait, and after so many minutes, he decided to say something.

"She wasn't just different," he finally said. "She was... exceptional and unique, like I said earlier. Unique in ways we couldn't understand. She terrifies us with the things she did. She terrified everyone."

A strange sensation crawled up her spine as he spoke, a mixture of curiosity, terror and something else. Something she couldn't understand but felt like a recognition.

"You have been mentioning being exceptional at the things she did. What did she do?"

With this question, he looked away, feeling he had been revealing too much, but said it anyway. "Some gifts or abilities are not meant to be talked about. Some stories are better left not discussed."

But again, she was done with the fear of not discussing the obvious, the truth. "Tell me. I need to know," she demanded again.

Immediately she asked the question, her phone buzzed, a text from an unknown number. The message she saw from the number made her blood run cold as she read it out.

Ask about the night of the storm.

Her father snapped up as if he had woken up from a night of sleep with that text. "Who sent you that message?"

She didn't want to read the words again, so she showed her dad, her hands trembling with fear. Was someone watching them? She stood up and took a look at the window to check if she would miraculously see someone who was watching them.

On the other hand, Markus' reaction was an instantaneous combination of fear and something that looked more disturbing, like anticipation.

"The night of the storm," he repeated like he knew something deeper related to that phrase. "The night things transformed."

Clouds began to gather outside the hospital, looking like they responded to the words that came out of her father's mouth, and Lizzy realized that what was about to be revealed regarding her family would change her life, and sincerely, she wasn't ready.

The cloud turned darker, the storm intensified, and Markus looked transfixed like he was in a vision that took him down memory lane to the night that made him see life differently.

"The night of the storm," he repeated, his voice filled with fear. "To start with, she wasn't an ordinary child."

She then leaned closer, the hospital room now felt like a room filled with unrevealed secrets. "What happened that night?"

He just stared blankly, about to tell her the most terrifying news Lizzy had ever heard. "That summer, you were just three, and Sophia was twelve, smart and unusual. Elena had just lost our son, the one we lost through a miscarriage, the one your mum talked to you about"

As he made this statement, a nurse passed and he paused for a while, thinking he was supposed to process what he was going to say. 

"We lived in a small and isolated place, a place she believed would protect Sophia, from…. from people." He paused again, his fingers were unconsciously tracing the pattern of the hospital's bedspread. 

"The unique abilities she had were what we had never seen a child do, so we thought we were lucky to have her, or sometimes unlucky…."

"What kind of abilities?" Lizzy pressed immediately, cutting him short in a way that surprised him.

There was another flash of lighting, but Markus' eyes seemed to look beyond the hospital walls, into a memory that both mesmerized and terrified him.

"One of the things she could do was to move things, not spiritually or with the help of spiritual powers, but with her mind," he said, still staring blankly at the window and changing his plaything from the bedspread to the blanket. "First of all, we thought it was a mistake or something else, from the falling of a book from the shelf to the falling of the plates from the table, it had been happening like a coincidence, but again..."

The last phrase hung in the air, pregnant with unbroken fear and horror.

"This night, called the night of the storm, was so different," he continued. "That fateful night, Elena was in the kitchen, you were playing with your dolls and building materials, and Sophia..." He closed his eyes, struggling to continue. "She was in her room, saying something."

As he talked, Lizzy realized his monitoring machines were running faster, looking like they were still responding to his words and his heart raced to the sound of the beeps.

"It was cold that night, and soon enough, the wind increased extraordinarily and was so violent, like something beyond the ordinary was about to happen and just then, we heard her scream."

She kept staring at him, expecting him to continue immediately. He took a break from staring at the window to looking at her, fear all over his eyes again.

"When we rushed to her room, leaving you behind, we found everything floating. Books. Furniture. Her toys. Everything was suspended in air, and there we found her in the center, her eyes completely white and unreadable."

"White? Unreadable?" Lizzy interrupted.

Markus nodded as he continued. "No Iris. No pupil. Pure white. And then she spoke. But it wasn't her voice. Not exactly."

Just before he continued another message came in, from the same phone number, saying another thing that connected to their discussion:

Are you tired? Don't be, because he has not told you everything yet. 

Ask him to tell you about everything, including the sacrifice.

She read it aloud again and this time, her father's face went colorless. "Who sent that again?"

But Lizzy didn't answer that question. Instead, she wanted him to answer all her questions. Facing him, she asked. "The sacrifice? What sacrifice?"

He looked at her and looked away, but before he did that, she saw something in his eyes. Overwhelming and pure guilt and sadness.

"What you do not understand is this: Some families have secrets, and some of those secrets protect people. Some do as much as destroy them."

Immediately, the hospital lights blinked. Once, twice, and it went completely dark in the hospital, which was surprising to the doctors and nurses as they panted going left and right, trying to find out what the matter was.

In the midst of the darkness, Lizzy felt something. A very strange presence. Something that felt foreign, yet astonishingly familiar.

After a few seconds, the lights returned, and a nurse came immediately to adjust Markus' IV and checked if the break in transmission did not affect him, yet she was not aware of anything unusual. Her father also did not notice anything, but Lizzy was convinced to her bones that something had changed.

Again, her phone buzzed, and she knew it was the same person. This time, the message was quite strange:

You're more like her than you know. The storm is coming. 

And this time, you won't be able to stop it.

As soon as they comprehended the message, they heard a loud crash somewhere in the hospital. Markus immediately felt the need to say everything quickly, before it becomes too late for any explanation.

"Listen attentively," he said, his voice extremely louder than a whisper. "Sophia was not just any kind of amazing or special child. She was a threat to everyone and everything she came across."

She started breathing uneasily. "What?"

He knew he needed to explain more, but before he could do that, they heard another crash, and they heard screams everywhere. A figure came from just anywhere standing against th

e hospital corridor, very close to Markus' room. She was strange, yet very familiar.

A very calm voice spoke:

"Hello, sister."