Chapter 6

Chapter 6

“Enough!” Ivy shouted.

The words came from her throat, which felt as though it were burning. There was no pleading in her voice anymore, nor any weak sobs to be heard. The scream echoed throughout the corridor on the second floor of the Carter mansion, successfully silencing the restrained breaths of Arthur, Jensen, and Redy, who had been staring at her with nothing but judgment.

Ivy slowly rose from her seated position on the floor. Her trembling legs were forced to stand upright. She wiped the remaining tears from her cheeks, then looked at the faces of the three men whom she had called her brothers for the past fourteen years, one by one. There was no longer any trace of love or longing in those clear eyes. All that remained was a blank gaze that had turned cold, frozen, and filled with wounds that ran far too deep.

“You think that letter is fake?” Ivy’s voice sounded calm, yet the tremor of anger within it was unmistakable, piercing straight into the consciousness of everyone around her. She pointed at the fragments of her medical report scattered across the floor with the tip of her finger. “You think I would turn my own death into some cheap joke just to steal your attention away from Sarah?”

Arthur frowned, slightly startled by Ivy’s sudden change in attitude and newfound courage to fight back. However, he immediately dismissed the strange feeling with his overwhelming ego.

“Stop putting on an act, Ivy! How long are you going to keep dramatizing everything, huh?”

“An act?” Ivy let out a small laugh, a bitter sound that was painful and cutting. She stepped closer to Arthur, looking straight into his eyes without the slightest fear. “Since when have I ever lied to you? Since when have I ever faked anything just to get your attention? You’re all so blind that you can’t even tell the difference between a lie and the truth!”

“Watch your mouth, Ivy!” Jensen shouted, his jaw tightening as he refused to let his sister speak to him that way.

“Why? Why should I stay quiet?” Ivy shot back sharply, shifting her hateful gaze toward Jensen. “You think I’m an attention seeker? Fine! Think whatever you want! But know this—the diagnosis is real! This disease is real, and it’s eating away at my body!”

Just as the atmosphere grew heated and the tension reached its peak, Sarah, who had been leaning against Redy’s back all this time, suddenly raised her head. Her fake tears began to fall gracefully again, creating the most pitiful expression anyone had ever seen.

“Brother Arthur... Brother Jensen... Brother Redy...” Sarah whimpered in a weak, trembling voice, deliberately drawing the three men’s attention back to her. “Don’t fight because of me... I’m fine...”

Sarah gently bit her lower lip, then looked toward Ivy with a deceitful gaze disguised as guilt.

“But... when I think about it, maybe what Sister Ivy said is true. But...” Sarah continued in an innocent tone that secretly pleased her. “During the month I’ve been living here, I’ve always seen Sister Ivy looking perfectly fine. She could even argue with people and still looked healthy. So why did she suddenly get diagnosed with acute leukemia today, exactly when all the attention was focused on me?”

The poisonous words flowed out effortlessly. Sarah deliberately planted seeds of suspicion in the minds of the three men, twisting the facts as though the medical diagnosis were merely another cruel trick Ivy had invented to reclaim the spotlight.

And, just as expected, the poison worked incredibly quickly.

Arthur, Jensen, and Redy were stunned by Sarah’s words. Their minds, already clouded by their hatred and bias, immediately swallowed her argument without question. To them, Sarah’s logic made perfect sense. How could someone who appeared healthy suddenly have a diagnosis for a deadly disease on the very same day she caused trouble?

“Sarah has a point,” Redy muttered in disappointment, looking at Ivy as though the girl standing before him were the most disgusting creature on earth. “You’re really becoming more and more cunning, Ivy. Using the ‘serious illness’ card just to make us feel guilty? What kind of pathetic trick is that?”

Jensen folded his arms across his chest, shaking his head with a mocking smile on his lips. “I almost believed you just now. Luckily, Sarah was observant enough to see through your lies.”

Ivy stood frozen. Her head was pounding violently. She stared at the three men with overwhelming disgust. Instead of feeling hurt because they did not believe her, a wave of burning anger swept through her, wiping away the last remnants of her affection. The emotional bond she had protected with all her heart and soul was severed in an instant. In her heart, at that very moment, she erased their status as her family. They were no longer her brothers. They were merely a group of foolish and cruel strangers.

“You’re all truly stupid,” Ivy whispered coldly, looking at Arthur, Jensen, and Redy one by one without the slightest fear. “Sarah is controlling you, and you don’t even realize it.”

“ENOUGH, IVY!” Arthur roared, having completely lost his patience. The man took two steps forward, preparing to grab Ivy’s arm.

However, before Arthur’s hand could touch Ivy, the hurried sound of footsteps in hard-soled shoes echoed across the corridor from the direction of the main staircase.

“What’s going on here?! Why is the house suddenly so noisy?!”

The hoarse yet authoritative voice broke through the tension. Hannah Carter—or, as she was more commonly known, Mrs. Carter—appeared at the end of the corridor, breathing heavily with a panicked expression on her face. The middle-aged woman had immediately rushed upstairs after hearing the commotion on the second floor.

Seeing her mother arrive, Sarah instantly changed her tactics. The cunning girl let herself collapse onto the floor, hugging her own knees while sobbing hysterically as though she had just suffered the worst abuse in her entire life.

“Mommy...” Sarah called in a tearful voice.

Mrs. Carter immediately gasped in shock. The woman hurried toward Sarah, then knelt down and pulled her biological daughter tightly into her arms.

“Oh my God, Sarah! What happened, my child?! Why are you crying like this?!” Mrs. Carter cried hysterically, touching Sarah’s face, which still bore the reddish marks. She then looked up and glared sharply at Arthur, Jensen, Redy, and finally Ivy, who stood rigidly near the wall. “Who dared hurt my daughter in this house?!”

“Mommy...” Sarah whimpered in a trembling voice, deliberately pointing toward Ivy with a shaking finger. “Sister Ivy... Sister Ivy didn’t mean to... ah, I mean, I only wanted to tidy up her things, but Sister Ivy got very angry...”

Sarah deliberately left the sentence hanging, giving Mrs. Carter room to imagine for herself just how cruelly Ivy must have treated her. And the strategy worked one hundred percent.

Mrs. Carter rose to her feet, breathing heavily. The anger that had already been fueled throughout the past month by her guilt over neglecting Sarah for more than a decade suddenly erupted into a wild blaze of fury. The woman strode quickly toward Ivy without listening to a single explanation.

“Ivy!” Mrs. Carter shouted, her hoarse voice trembling violently with rage. “I’ve told you countless times, never touch Sarah! Why don’t you have a heart, huh?!”

Ivy looked at the woman she had once loved and respected deeply with cold, expressionless eyes. There were no tears left for her to shed.

Seeing Ivy’s cold gaze—which Mrs. Carter interpreted as defiance and a complete lack of remorse—caused the middle-aged woman’s remaining patience to collapse completely.

“It’s okay, Mommy...” Sarah whispered from below, deliberately provoking her in a voice that everyone could still hear. “Maybe Sister Ivy really hates me...”

Hearing those words, Mrs. Carter’s anger reached its peak and exploded. She completely lost control of herself.

Without wasting another second, her right hand swung freely through the air.

Slap!

A hard and vicious slap landed squarely on Ivy’s left cheek. The sound of the impact echoed loudly throughout the entire corridor, bouncing off the marble walls of the luxurious Carter mansion.

Ivy’s head was violently thrown to the side by the force of the blow. An intense burning sensation, pain, and numbness immediately spread across half of her face. The corner of her lip split open, releasing a small amount of fresh blood that slowly dripped onto the floor.

Ivy’s thin body staggered backward, almost crashing into the wall if she had not immediately gripped the doorframe of her own bedroom to steady herself. The throbbing pain in her head suddenly intensified, causing her vision to blur for several seconds after the relentless emotional and physical blows she had endured.

Mrs. Carter breathed heavily, her chest rising and falling as she struggled to contain her overwhelming emotions. The woman pointed directly at Ivy’s face with a violently trembling finger.

“How dare you slap my daughter, huh?!” Mrs. Carter screamed in a shrill voice filled with hatred, forgetting the undeniable fact that it was not Ivy who had slapped Sarah, but Sarah herself who had injured her own cheek for the sake of her performance. “You ungrateful stray! We gave you a place to live, sent you to school, and gave you a decent life in this house for fourteen years, yet your behavior is no better than that of a wild animal!”

The words were delivered with such cruelty that they pierced directly into Ivy’s heart without the slightest mercy.

Arthur, Jensen, Redy, and Sarah watched the scene in a silence filled with triumph. Not one of them had any intention of intervening or stopping Mrs. Carter. In their eyes, the punishment was a fitting consequence for someone they believed was always spreading hatred and creating drama.

However, behind the blood trickling from the corner of her lips, Ivy did not cry. She did not release a single sob of regret as she normally would.

Ivy slowly raised her head again. She wiped the blood from the corner of her lips with the back of her hand, then looked at Mrs. Carter, Arthur, Jensen, Redy, and Sarah one by one.

“Watch your attitude if you still want to remain part of the Carter family, Ivy!”