I Bet My Soul on My Mother’s Love Chapter 10

I Bet My Soul on My Mother’s Love Chapter 10

Mom had completely lost her mind.

Determined to avenge the sheer injustice of my life, the Grim Reaper had systematically transformed every single drop of agony I endured into an infinite loop of vivid nightmares, forcing them into Mom’s

subconscious every time she closed her eyes.

With every hour of sleep she took, her grip on reality slipped a little further.

My time on earth was rapidly drawing to a close; soon, I would dissolve into a nameless spirit, incapable of ever stepping into the cycle of rebirth.

The Grim Reaper just stood beside me, shaking his head as a heavy, dark mist rolled off his cloak.

“I have zero tolerance for souls who die covered in unearned slander,” he growled, his voice echoing with a terrifying, righteous authority. “The absolute truth will be paid in full.”

Inside Mom’s nightmares, she was forced to watch a younger version of me talking back to a cruel drill instructor. I had been ordered to run a grueling ten-mile march under a scorching midday sun as punishment.

In the dream, the instructor had scoffed, “You’re just a discarded piece of trash. Your own mother doesn’t

even want you.”

And a younger, trembling, utterly terrified version of myself had actually found the courage to snap back through my tears: “That’s a lie! My mom loves me!”

That tiny, desperate declaration had earned me nothing but ruthless mockery from the guards and weeks of amplified torment.

I had been forced to swallow my own blood and choke down every ounce of humiliation, yet the misery never stopped pouring in.

Then, the nightmare shifted, forcing Mom to watch me strapped down to a cold, sterile shock bed, getting violently electrocuted simply because my throat had seized up and I couldn’t swallow the spoiled slop they served. The electrical currents had caused my body to lose control, leaving me lying in my own fluids, utterly broken and humiliated.

Mom woke up with a start, her face streaked with tears.

But the dream wasn’t done with her. It violently dragged her back to the day Lily was born. She watched from a third-person perspective as a tiny, innocent version of me stood before the terrifying visage of Death, fearlessly bargaining away my own soul to stop her from hemorrhaging to death.

I had signed away my eternity without a single second of hesitation.

In the vision, the Grim Reaper had tried to scare me, leaning low as he whispered “if your soul shatters, you will cease to exist. You’ll never get to play your piano again, you’ll never taste birthday cake and you will never see your mother’s face. It is an excruciating, agonizing dissolution into the void, where dark entities

will tear at your spirit. You will go straight to hell.”

But no matter how terrifying Death tried to make the consequences sound to a child, I had stubbornly

planted my feet and demanded the contract be sealed.

To my juvenile mind, my mother’s life was worth more than the entire universe. Lily’s life came second. No one on heaven or earth was going to stop me from saving her.

My obsession had been too powerful, my devotion too absolute. Even Death itself couldn’t break my resolve

So when the wager was finalized and I saw Mom and Lily miraculously open their eyes on the delivery table cheating a double fatality, I had been completely overwhelmed with joy. I was celebrating the fact that the Grim Reaper hadn’t lied to me-my mother was alive.

Yet, Mom had looked at my smile and branded me a heartless, narcissistic monster. She assumed I was entirely devoid of empathy, that I was a broken child who only cared about asserting my dominance over a

newborn infant.

A misunderstanding that had taken twelve agonizing years to finally unravel.

I wasn’t the villain of her story. I was the lamb that had willingly marched into the slaughterhouse so she

could live.

Mom watched the memory play out from the ceiling of her mind, her spectral form trembling so violently she could barely breathe.

The final layer of the nightmare forced her to relive the exact moment I knelt on the hospital floor, begging her to say she loved me the most. She watched herself reject me with an icy, self-righteous disgust.

And then, she was forced to watch me crawl back into the dark, stifling storage room, sitting in the dust as quietly waited for the clock to strike midnight.

The storage room had become my literal coffin.

She watched my soul slowly fracturing, peeling away from my physical body in agonizing, glowing shards until my earthly shell went entirely cold. The child she had labeled a monster was now just a rotting corpse left in the trash.

Mom woke up for the final time, her eyes completely bloodshot and hollow.

She had witnessed every single second of the life she had destroyed. She wiped the infinite stream of tears

from her face, slowly forcing herself to stand.

A broken, self-deprecating laugh escaped her lips.

“Who can I possibly blame for this?” she whispered to the empty room, her voice dead. “The only monster in

this house is me.”

“I let my own arrogance blind me. I dragged my own daughter to the gallows and broke her heart until it stopped beating.”

“Her final wish was so incredibly small… a single sentence would have sufficed.”

“Keeping her alive would have been the easiest thing in the world. All I had to do was move my lips, and she would have lived a long, beautiful life.”

“But I was so intent on punishing her that I made sure she lost her wager. I am an utterly worthless mother.”

On the seventh day, the Grim Reaper materialized in front of my floating spirit, a deeply complex, unreadable expression carved into his ancient features.

“Your mother has formally petitioned the laws of the underworld,” he murmured softly. “She has offered to descend into the lowest depths of the eighteen layers of hell to endure eternal torment and wipe away your debt, allowing your spirit to enter the cycle of reincarnation.”

“Technically, it goes against the strict parameters of our original contract. But… I have decided to grant her

request.”

“She is trading her eternity to buy back your freedom.”

I froze in mid-air, slowly closing my eyes as a profound sense of peace washed over my tattered spirit.

I suppose it was a fitting end.

The seasons would continue to turn, and my soul would finally find a home.

The words I had spent a lifetime bleeding for had finally found their way to me through the void.

“Mom loves you the most, Chloe.”