~Chapter 22~

The woman in red twisted her fork when she saw a familiar face on the streets, laughing, smiling and over all things linking hands with opposite gender! She was so divested in her emotion that she forgot that she wasn't alone and was accompanying someone else along with her.

That someone else became concerned about her locked jaw, unblinking eyes and the twisting of the metal fork; "Are you okay? Is there something wrong with the food?" the voice brought back the latter to reality. Her red lips twisted into a smile to hide her true nature as she reassured the concerned one that it's nothing.

After the completion of their meal, the two women made a small talk as they took a casual stroll around the marketplace. The woman in red asked about a certain someone to the other woman, making the latter greatly surprised. To quell any kind of suspicion the woman in red made some excuses that made the other woman smile in relief.

The unsuspecting woman then proceeded to quench the thirst of knowledge of the woman in red talking about the queried someone including the typical teenage fiasco that is going on in Roschend High making her emotional that soon they'll graduate from their high school.

Both the women were so immersed in their conversation that they didn't even realize that one of them has reached her house. As they bid goodbye to each other, what the woman disappearing inside her house didn't know that this week will be last week of her twenty seven years of life.

"Still the little whore as always I see."

Emilia stood rooted in her spot as she saw a woman having similar blonde hair like her looking at her with eyes full of scrutiny.

"Well it's not the first time that you disappointed me. It is in your nature to whore around, spread your legs irrespective of—"

"Brenda!"

The said woman drew an exasperated sigh and looked back. Emilia has gone radio silent and Rio is trying his best to understand what was going on. Emilia isn't behaving like her regular self, she of all people is a huge chatterbox, more than Luke and it isn't like her to take bullshit from others.

"What are you doing? Why haven't you gone home?"

"What's the rush sis when I have finally met with my ever so busy VIP daughter~." The blonde woman's voice was full of mockery. "So, my daughter, how have you been? Good I guess after destroying your mother's life? Hmm?"

"M-mom I—" Emilia choked not because her almost lookalike mother shook her head violently making a tutting sound in her mouth but because there were far too many emotions that she wanted to convey to her mother but everything ended up getting clogged in her throat.

"Uh huh uh. That word, that word doesn't suit your lips at all. A slut, a sinner like you don't get to call me that." Emilia would've slipped her hand out of Rio's had it not been for the boy who held on to her tightly never letting her go, a reassuring warmth spreading all through her body.

"I don't know who you are but you are being utterly disrespectful for speaking like that to Emilia." Rio started to speak before he could stop himself. The girl beside him almost stopped breathing.

"Well dear, I am Emilia's birth giver…" The moment Brenda spoke the word 'birth giver', something within the addressed girl broke and she could feel tears accumulating in her eyes, but she forced them down, never letting them fall, not at least in front of her mother. "….Brenda Lewis. And I'd have considered it to be a pleasure of knowing you had you not poked your dumb nose into somewhere it doesn't belong."

"Brenda that's enough go home." Miss Johannes' words were once again ignored.

"Still, it doesn't give you the right—"

"Seems like you are the one who is being disrespectful to me without knowing everything about the wench beside you." Rio felt Emilia getting visibly tensed. "Who are you anyway butting in out of nowhere? Her new fuck buddy?"

"No. I-I…" Rio clenched his jaw and his hold on Emilia's warm hands as he stopped worrying about the consequences as he blurted; "I am her boyfriend, Rio Sanders."

"Boyfriend? Ha! What a joke! Mr. Boyfriend, do you know what a slut she is?"

"No I do not, neither I'd like to know. If she wishes to tell about it in the future I'll surely lend an ear, but if she's not comfortable speaking about it to me I am fine by being ignorant."

Emilia couldn't help but smile for Rio's words. Finally she lifted up her bowed head, her body relaxed and she made an eye contact with her mother for the first time in twelve years. All the abuses that were hurled upon her, the names that she got called to by her own mother on a stormy night when she was kicked out in the mud twelve years back seemed to be vanishing, the weight of abuses gradually lessened away from her shoulders. She thought she was living up to the names her mother called her till now but at present for the first time she felt clean, pure and fresh.

"I think it is time for you to go back where you came from Brenda. The kids have made themselves clear to you."

"Hah! Keep on deluding yourselves then!"

"Mrs. Lewis," Emilia called out to Brenda in a voice that she herself didn't realize to be her own; "I free you. I free you from being whatever you were to me, so now you are a free person, not only legally but emotionally as well from my side. And you can be rest assured that there'll no contact from our side to yours either and I pray that one day you'll end up eating all the words that you have spewed upon me."

No words were further exchanged as Brenda Lewis simply slammed her car door and drove off without looking back.