Touch Me and Mourn Them

I was born tied to a karmic recoil. Whatever cruelty someone inflicts upon me rebounds a hundredfold upon the person they love most in this world. When I was seven, my foster parents plotted to cash in on my life insurance. They shoved me in front of a speeding delivery truck. I stumbled, scraped my knee on the gravel, and burst into tears. Across the street, their biological son spontaneously collapsed—every bone in his legs snapping like dry twigs, leaving him paralyzed on the spot. Terrified, my foster parents spent the night dragging religious relics and altars into my bedroom, kneeling by my mattress until dawn, praying for my eternal health. When I was fifteen, a kidnapper threw a burlap sack over my head. Irritated by my sobs, he backhanded me across the face. Back in his hometown, hundreds of miles away, his only boy suddenly seized with a violent, unexplained fever that stripped him of his hearing forever. The kidnapper turned himself into the precinct before sunrise, clinging to the sergeant’s desk and weeping: "She isn't human! If you touch a hair on her head, my bloodline is dead!" Then came eighteen, when the blue-blooded Prescotts finally tracked me down and brought me back to their gated estate. I reached out to touch the car door handle, and my biological mother immediately ordered the staff to shove me out into a torrential downpour. "You smell like cheap motels and rain gutters," she sneered, peering through the entryway. "Wash off the poverty out there. You don’t step foot across my threshold until you're clean." I simply shrugged, folded my arms, and yawned in the rain. Less than thirty seconds later, a bloodcurdling scream shattered the stillness inside the mansion. "Ma'am! Oh God, Miss Evie is throwing up blood!" 1 Genevieve Prescott, the girl who had taken my place for eighteen years, collapsed across the marble foyer, coughing up dark crimson until she went completely limp. The butler leaned down, two trembling fingers pressed against her neck. "She... she barely has a pulse!" My mother lost her mind. "Call an ambulance! Get the car, now!" Mid-panic, her gaze drifted toward the French doors and landed on me. Some primal, terrifying realization seemed to dawn on her. Without an umbrella, she sprinted into the downpour, hooked her manicured hands under my arms, and practically hauled me inside. "I must be losing my mind," she sobbed, tears cutting through her foundation. "What was I thinking? Why would I leave you out there?" Sniffling and shuddering, she wrapped me in a thick cashmere throw, personally heating bowls of bone broth and spooning them into my mouth. My older brother was skeptical. To prove a point, he cut off my allowance card. I went twenty-four hours without a proper meal. That night, Genevieve suffered a spontaneous perforated gastric ulcer and ended up in the surgical ICU, clutching life by a thread. After two brushes with death, the entire Prescott family fell into line. If I cleared my throat, someone fell to their knees offering hot tea. Genevieve herself transformed into my personal shadow, hovering anxiously with porcelain bowls. "Thea, please, drink the soup while it's hot. You have to take care of your health..." This delicate ecosystem lasted three months—until Genevieve's high-powered fiancé returned from Europe ahead of schedule. Griffin Carrington walked through the double doors to find his pampered, aristocratic fiancée kneeling on the rug, carefully massaging my calves. His expression turned instantly murderous. "What backwater stray thinks she can treat my woman like hired help?" Before the words could even settle, Genevieve shot up and slapped Griffin across the face. The crack echoed through the vaulted room. A bead of blood welled at the corner of Griffin’s lip. My parents and brother froze, holding their breath. Genevieve had worshiped the ground Griffin walked on for years; a single furrow of his brow used to ruin her entire week. Griffin was stunned. He pressed a hand to his burning cheek, staring at her in disbelief. "Evie? Have you lost your mind? She’s abusing you, and you’re defending her?!" "Shut up! Don't you dare raise your voice at my sister!" Genevieve glanced down at her reddened palm, trembling, but she stepped squarely in front of me with her arms spread wide. "I don't care what kind of empire you run out there, Griffin. If you lay a finger on Thea today, I will tear you apart myself!" Her voice cracked with genuine panic. "If anything happens to her, people will die!" She understood the math better than anyone. If Griffin broke my arm, she would likely drop dead before the ambulance reached the gates. Griffin ground his teeth, glaring past her shoulder straight at me. "People will die? Please. You’re letting this charlatan run your house." He scoffed, loosening his silk tie. "She’s leveraging blood ties to act like a tyrant. Evie, you're too soft. That's why she has you under her thumb." He stepped forward, effortlessly shoving Genevieve aside. "Today, I'm going to teach this little interloper what happens when you touch someone who belongs to me." "No—don't!" my parents shrieked in unison. Griffin moved too fast. He lunged, his fingers clamping like a vise around my wrist. With a violent jerk, he wrenched me off the sofa and threw me aside. I hit the Persian rug hard, the back of my hand clipping the sharp beveled glass of the coffee table. A shallow crimson line bloomed across my skin. I watched the blood bead, then slowly raised my eyes to meet his. "Griffin Carrington," I said, tilting my head with a slow, measured smile. "You've got quite a grip. Took some skin off." I paused, letting the silence settle. "I really hope you can keep that smirk on your face in about sixty seconds." "Thea!!" My parents and brother practically threw themselves onto the floor to help me up, their faces pale as chalk. Then, in perfect synchronization, every head snapped toward Genevieve. "Evie! Sweetheart, how are you? Tell Mommy where it hurts!" Genevieve's color drained away completely. She dropped to the carpet, curling inward as if bracing for her wrist to shatter into splinters. One minute passed. Nothing happened. Slowly, Genevieve opened her eyes. She touched her wrist. She patted down her ribs, her collarbone. Not a scratch. The room went dead silent. Genevieve blinked at me, then at Griffin, her mind spinning. Had the rule broken? Was the curse gone? Griffin pointed at the room, his lip curling in contempt. "Look at yourselves. The entire Prescott family has lost its mind. Cowering before a runaway." Just as his laughter reached its peak, his phone buzzed violently in his tailored trousers. He answered, casual and arrogant. "What?" A wail tore through the speaker, so raw it cut through the room: "Mr. Carrington! Come home, please! Your mother—she was praying in the chapel, and she was thrown across the room! Her right wrist just snapped! The bone broke clean through the skin, and she's passed out from the pain!" 2 "You're saying "what"?!" Griffin gripped the phone, his knuckles whitening, his eyes darting to the fresh scrape on my right hand. For a fraction of a second, raw terror flickered across his features. But stubborn arrogance quickly rushed in to fill the void. "Prep the car! Call every chief orthopedic surgeon in the city to the hospital immediately!" He hung up, pointing an accusatory finger at me, his jaw clenched tight. "Thea Prescott, right? Don't think for a second that bribing my household staff with parlor tricks is going to work on me. You'd better pray my mother pulls through this." Without waiting for a reply, he stormed out. Genevieve scrambled up from the floor, leaning against the sofa for support, her lips bloodless. "Griffin Carrington... you hypocrite. All that talk about loving me, and I'm not even the person you care about most." She rushed to retrieve the first-aid kit, dropping to her knees beside me with antiseptic and sterile gauze. "Does it sting, Thea? Let me blow on it. Please don't be upset, I beg you." I watched her hands shake, leaning back against the cushions. "It stings a little. But someone else is having a much worse afternoon." I sighed softly. "Some men won't believe in the fire until they smell their own skin burning." My mother wiped cold sweat from her brow, letting out a shaky breath. "Thank God he wasn't thinking about Evie... otherwise she would've taken the hit." My father snapped to attention, roaring at the house staff: "Double the security detail around Thea! Griffin is unhinged—he won't let this go." My father was right. Griffin Carrington was a man accustomed to absolute control. By midnight, standing over his mother's mangled arm in the hospital, he had completely lost his grip on reality. He refused to entertain the idea of karmic retribution; in his mind, I was an operative, an extortionist who had poisoned the Prescotts and infiltrated his family's staff. He decided to cut out the rot himself. Honestly? I felt a little insulted. I hadn't lifted a finger. The following afternoon, I went for a brief walk along the private estate road. An unmarked black van screeched to a halt beside me. Half a dozen men in tactical gear piled out, pressing a chemical-soaked rag over my mouth and nose. I didn't bother fighting it. I simply closed my eyes and let them haul me into the chassis. If a dutiful son was this desperate to show his devotion, who was I to deny him? When I came to, I was strapped to a cold metal chair in a climate-controlled subterranean cellar beneath a private country estate. "Awake?" Griffin sat on a leather sofa across from me, the tip of a cigar glowing between his fingers. "My patience is running thin, Thea." He blew a thick ribbon of smoke toward the vaulted ceiling. "Give me the compounds you used on the Prescotts, and tell me who in my mother's household is on your payroll." I rolled my wrists against the coarse hemp rope, noting the chafed skin. "Griffin, if I were you, I’d be on my knees untying these knots right now, praying not a single strand of my hair falls out." I offered him a faint, pitying smile. "Every second you keep me here, your mother slips one step closer to the morgue." "Still running your mouth with a gun to your head?" Griffin crushed the cigar into a crystal ashtray, the veins along his temples throbbing. "I have private security barricading every entrance to her hospital wing. A fly couldn't get onto her floor without clearance. Let's see what little games you can play from inside an isolation room." He gestured to his assistant. "Give her the dose." The assistant stepped forward holding a glass tumbler filled with a foul-smelling, murky solution. "Gastric lavage fluid mixed with heavy emetics," Griffin said, looking down at me with cold satisfaction. "Once it hits your stomach, you'll endure violent contractions, nausea, and internal hemorrhaging until you're vomiting acid and bile. Let's see how stubborn your spine is against pharmaceutical-grade agony." I didn't flinch. I looked him dead in the eye. "Are you entirely sure you want to do this, Mr. Carrington?" "Pour it down her throat!" Griffin barked. The heavy grip of a bodyguard forced my jaw open. With a sharp tilt of the glass, the bitter concoction flooded down my esophagus. It burned like battery acid. Within thirty seconds, my abdomen felt as though it were being shredded from the inside out. A cold sweat broke across my skin, soaking my collar. "Ugh..." I curled forward in the chair, my muscles locking in agony. Griffin smiled, stepping closer to pat my cheek patronizingly. "How does that feel? Ready to talk?" I bit through my bottom lip, the metallic taste of blood mingling with the bitter fluid. With immense effort, I lifted my head, sweat dripping from my chin, and forced a broken grin. "Check the time, Griffin." My voice rasped. "Your mother... should be headed into emergency surgery for intubation right about now." 3 Across town, inside the VIP wing of St. Jude's Private Hospital. Mrs. Beatrice Carrington—still sedated from the orthopedic reconstruction on her wrist—suddenly vaulted upward against her restraints with a blood-freezing shriek. "Aaargh—!!" The scream echoed down the private ward. The monitoring nurses rushed to the bedside in horror to find her curled into a rigid fetal position, her heart rate plummeting on the telemetry screen. The chief surgeon sprinted through the double doors, glanced at the vitals, and went white. "Massive acute gastric hemorrhage! Her stomach lining is tearing itself apart!" he yelled. "Prep the OR! Move, move, move!" Back in the subterranean cellar, the emetics continued to tear through my digestive tract. Sweat dripped steadily onto the concrete floor. I strained against the chair, forcing my vision to clear enough to lock onto Griffin. "Griffin..." I whispered through bloodless lips. "You might want to answer that call. Otherwise, you won't even make it in time to sign the death certificate." On the low table nearby, his phone was vibrating frantically, the screen illuminating the dim space. His assistant looked down at the caller ID, sweating profusely, and reached for it. Griffin kicked him squarely in the shin. "Get out! Don't interrupt me!" Griffin grabbed my chin, his fingers digging deep into the bone. "Still trying to play psychological warfare, Thea? I told you, my men have that floor on complete lockdown. If you don't hand over the antidote for whatever you did to Evie, you leave this room in a body bag." Losing the last shred of his composure, Griffin seized a brass electric kettle from the side counter—the water inside still bubbling at a rolling boil—and tipped it without hesitation over my injured right wrist. "Ah—!" The boiling water seared my skin instantly, turning the flesh angry red and raising thick, weeping blisters. "Griffin Carrington! You really are the most devoted son on the planet, aren't you?" My body convulsed from the searing heat, but a ragged laugh tore from my throat anyway. "You won't rest until you've butchered your own mother with your bare hands, will you? Fine! Have it your way!" The sound of my laughter seemed to crawl beneath Griffin's skin, raising the hair on his arms. Just as he raised the kettle to dump the remaining boiling water over my lap— "Crash!" The heavy steel door was flung open. The assistant he had kicked out stumbled back inside, practically throwing an iPad into Griffin's face. "Sir! Look at the monitors! Something is terribly wrong in the ICU!" Griffin glanced at the screen. The kettle slipped from his fingers, crashing onto the concrete and shattering in a spray of scalding water. On the screen, Mrs. Carrington was writhing in agony, teeth clenched so hard they bled. Her right wrist—freshly bandaged—was swelling with blistering, weeping burns that bloomed directly beneath the sterile dressing. The audio feed crackled with the chief surgeon's frantic shouting: "Her pressure is tanking! What are these burns?! The tissue is necrotizing out of nowhere!" "We're losing the rhythm! Clear! Get the crash cart, charge to two hundred!"