I Bet My Soul on My Mother’s Love Chapter 07

I Bet My Soul on My Mother’s Love Chapter 07

Mom suddenly remembered my existence and shot me a text message.

[There’s food in the kitchen, and I left two hundred dollars in the master bedroom nightstand drawer Go buy yourself something if you get hungry.]

Her fingers hesitated over the screen, her facial expression twisting into an awkward, tense display of worry

[Your sister is incredibly sick, and we have to stay by her side right now.]

[Stop trying to compete with her for attention and throwing tantrums. Eat your meals properly, and stop being so childish.]

I floated right next to her, listening to her mutter under her breath.

“Your sister is literally dying, so why do you constantly have to fight her for affection?”

“Once she passes away, absolutely everything in this house will be left to you anyway.”

“Chloe, why on earth can’t you just yield to your sister for once? All she has left is our love… She’s leaving us soon, so what is wrong with giving her a little bit of favoritism?”

So that was why.

But Mom, to save your lives, I had a wager to fulfill too.

Without your favoritism, I would die.

Why would you ever think I wanted to fight my sister for attention?

She was the little girl I bought back with my very own life.

She was my own flesh and blood, my precious little sister. How could I ever bring myself to be genuinely angry at her, or try to steal from her?

All I ever wanted was to protect her.

Later that afternoon, Mom met up with her close friend, Sarah.

Sarah had a deeply rebellious teenage son. He was constantly acting out and talking back to her

Hoping to learn from Mom’s experience, Sarah had followed her advice a while back and shipped her son off to the exact same military reform academy I had attended.

But right now, Sarah was consumed by an erratic, breathless panic. She gripped Mom’s shoulders, violently

shaking her as she interrogated her.

“Why on earth did you recommend that school to me?! My son jumped from the roof! He committed suicide

“We’ve been friends for decades, and you sat there and watched me push my own child straight into a burning furnace!”

“Didn’t you know?! That place isn’t an academy-it’s a literal living hell!”

“They force the kids to eat spoiled slop! The second anyone talks back to an instructor or a guard, they break them with strict discipline and electric shocks! When the police found my son’s body, there wasn’t a single inch of clean skin left on him!”

“He was covered from head to toe in horrific signs of torture! And your Chloe is a young girl! She spent six years there! What kind of sick, twisted monster are you?!”

Mom froze, the blood completely draining from her face.

Her usual poised, dignified demeanor shattered instantly. Her footsteps became frantic and clumsy as she stumbled backward.

“That’s impossible… That place is a fully accredited, high-intervention behavioral boot camp!”

“The annual tuition and boarding fees cost over a hundred thousand dollars! I only wanted to give my

disobedient daughter some proper structure! How could this be happening?”

“How could she have survived six years of torture?!”

Ignoring Lily’s desperate cries and phone calls, Mom bolted out of the cafe and sprinted all the way home.

She wanted to see me. She wanted to look me in the eye and ask me face-to-face about everything I had

endured over the last six years.

But Mom, I won’t be able to answer you this time.

Under the blistering heat of the mid-summer sun, the storage room had turned into an oven. My corpse was already beginning to decay, a foul odor seeping through the cracks of the door.

Mom frantically threw the storage room door open, her eyes locking onto my rotting, lifeless body.

She collapsed instantly, her mind completely fracturing as she screamed in absolute denial.

The Grim Reaper had set my official cause of death as sudden cardiac arrest.

Locked away in that cramped, pitch-black room, my final resting posture was a little grotesque.

If I had known, I would have begged the Grim Reaper to let me look a bit prettier in death.

Mom crawled forward and pulled my cold, decaying torso into her arms, a single tear spilling from her eyes

“This can’t be real… Chloe has always been perfectly healthy. She never got sick a day in her life. How could

she just drop dead?”

When I was alive, I used to bring up death to her all the time. I would look at her and say:

“Mom, if you don’t love me the most, I am really going to die.”

“Mom, if you don’t say those words, I will literally die.”

Every single time, she would get furious, assuming I was using cheap threats to manipulate her.

But I hadn’t lied to her.

Something that bizarre and impossible had actually been my reality.

I told you, Mom. Without your love, I would literally die.

Her voice cracked into a guttural, broken sob, her tears flowing infinitely faster than they ever did during

Lily’s medical emergencies.

“Chloe Vance, how did it end up like this?”

“When you were being abused and tormented at that school, you just kept it all bottled up inside.”

“Why didn’t you tell Mom you were sick?!”