Owned? - Chapter 60：Azalea’s story part 5

Things sometimes happen so suddenly that even when they’ve passed you can’t come to terms with the fact that it actually happened.

Dahlia and Claire’s death was a blow to all of us.

Up until many months I couldn’t believe that my last blood had left me.

Neither could aunt and uncle, that their only daughter had met such a sudden death.

I kept forgetting she wasn’t there and often called out her name.

It slipped my mind time and again, whenever I wasn’t concentrating and often came from home expecting her to come and greet me with her goofy smile.

But it was never going to happen again. Everything was gone.

I’d come back to my senses and each time it would break me all over again, yet I couldn’t help but smile painfully to myself.

“Lia…” I would whisper into space as I looked to the sky, “I love you…” And each time I couldn’t help but cry, “And I miss you…”

The incident had changed everything.

I was guilty of pushing Claire on the road but I could never confess. I just told everyone it happened while we were playing.

I pushed the thought and act in the dark depths of my mind.

I put it somewhere it wouldn’t hurt me

I didn’t want to remember that I was the cause of someone’s death but it wasn’t like I could completely forget it.

After all, how could I?

Guilt never leaves you.

Aunt and Uncle changed as well, after losing their only child they became depressed.

Many times they would get suspicious that I was the one who caused her death but there was no proof.

Our relationship began to change. They became more cold towards me and sometimes even did mean things but in the end I was the only one they had, so they couldn’t let me go either.

In attempts to relax and get better uncle decided to get a kitten and named him Misa.

Unfortunately that didn’t work out as well. Misa got a virus and ended up dying just when everyone was getting attached to him.

It had an even worse toll on aunt.

She started taking it out on me. She would snap at small things and then would apologize out of nowhere.

Shortly after Misa’s death, one day I refused to have dinner and aunt snapped at me.

We had a big argument about it.

“You live in my house!!” She yelled at me, “You go with my rules!!”

“It’s nothing to be mad about!!” I yelled back at her.

I knew she was no longer in her right mind but I didn’t expect her to go this crazy.

She threw the cooking oil at me suddenly and I realized this was turning bad.

I tried running away when she called uncle, “Laurence, hold this ungrateful bitch.”

Uncle grabbed me as I was running towards my room and held me down.

I knew what she was going to do..

I begged them to let me go but aunt lit the match stick she always kept on the kitchen shelf despite my appeals at mercy.

When we are in trouble and even know it’s going to end bad, we still hope somewhere in our hearts that the other person will somehow let us go and show compassion or pity, even though that never happens.

When I saw that no mercy was going to come from them, I bit uncle’s arm to escape.

I bit him so hard that it started bleeding and yet still, I was too late.

Flares of fire rose as I felt my back burn. I didn’t know that you had to roll on the ground to extinguish the flames so I just screamed in pain and horror.

In the end, out of pure coincidence I fell in Misa’s sandbox while running around and the flames died.

Along with the heat extinguishing I passed out as well.

I woke in the hospital, the treatment had already been done but the doctor told me it would leave bad scars.

The incident wasn’t made into a case and wasn’t reported to the police.

I didn’t see the point of it, I wasn’t going to win or gain anything from it.

And just like that I continued living with them.