Spiderweb - 152 Luck

“What is it?” she asked with a slight annoyance showing on her face.

Maybe it was because she spent a lot of her time around Mrs. Cloud, but she felt the rush in her blood when she felt the rapping against the window. When she rolled it down, she wanted to yell, to hit the person outside the winder with her fist and scold them for making them late to the meeting.

Much like what Mrs. Cloud was feeling at that moment.

The bodyguard’s face looked grim as he pointed to a spot beside the car. He looked pale and his lips trembled as he tried to speak.

The secretary rolled her eyes and got out of her seat. “If it isn’t something so amazing or impactful that out precious time had to be wasted over this,” the secretary began as she walked around the car to the spot the bodyguard was pointing to, “I’ll make sure that your sal-”

Her steps slowed down as she stopped in front of what the bodyguard had noticed. Slowly, she turned around and walked back to the car, quickly opening the passenger door and entering.

Mrs. Cloud didn’t even bother to look at the secretary. “What was it?”

“There’s a body on the side of the road,” The secretary reported to Mrs. cloud. She turned around in her seat to face Mrs. Cloud, “It’s Juan Hanes.”

Mrs. Cloud sat still for a moment before chuckling. “So she did make it back?” she muttered to herself as she locked eyes with the secretary, “did she make it back in one piece?”

The secretary thought about it for a moment, rethinking the moments from earlier. There were all sorts of wounds all over her body. There were cuts on her knees and bite marks that almost wrapped around her entire leg. Gunshots seemed to line her leg and arm, from each cut, there was blood trickling out, deep red falling to the ground again and again with the softness of falling rain.

The secretary turned to Mrs. Cloud who was awaiting her answer. “She’s in one piece. Possibly on the verge of death but is in one piece.”

Mrs. Cloud smiled, her cheekbone spreading into the brightest smile the secretary had seen all day. The best part was that it looked real. There wasn’t a blankness in her eyes that completely took away from the smile and neither was she just voicing the laugh without the actual emotions.

That taken, it didn’t seem like a moment in which someone would smile, especially not as they got out of the car and walked to the soon-to-be corpse.

Yet, the smile never dimmed. It was bright, shining like a star in the night sky as it bent down before the disheveled body. Her grin grew even wider when the eyes of the body seemed to turn to Mrs. Cloud, noticing her presence.

Mrs. Cloud squatted in front of Juan, meeting eye to eye on the same eye level. Mrs. Cloud smiled again and the secretary flinched. There was something wrong with that smile, there was something sinister about that angelic smile… no it wasn’t about the angelic smile but at the person who showed it.

It didn’t look like Mrs. Cloud misread the situation. She was eye to eye with the dimming lights in Juan’s eyes, her eyes were looking over the number of injuries on Juan and she probably understood the situation much sooner than the others did. ‘Then why… why was she smiling at this moment? Did she not recognize that that was Juan? No… she shouldn’t be laughing even if it wasn’t,’ the secretary thought to herself as she looked down at Mrs. Cloud who was observing Juan

She stepped back a bit when Mrs. Cloud looked up at her with her cheery expression. “Isn’t Juan such a good girl?” Mrs. Cloud asked.

Waves upon waves of shudders ran over the secretary at that moment, her pupils wavering in fear.

Mrs. Cloud turned back to Juan. In just one day, she managed to discolor her face, become starved for water, loses the vitality in her skin and face, wrinkles growing on her forehead, and she had managed to hurt every part of her body visible.

“What a good girl…” Mrs. Cloud muttered as she examined Juan’s wounds, “at least now I know that you listened very well to my last request.”

The secretary thought back to what she could probably have asked for and shuddered when she realized what was going on but even after getting down the facts, she refused to understand it.

“You did well Juan, it seems like I don’t need to do anything to you myself,” Mrs. Cloud chuckled, “who knew you would listen to my comment. ‘To be on the verge of death’ or ‘to have me put you on the verge of death and then leave you to die’ It doesn’t seem like such a bad request when you’re there right? Everything would seem sluggish and warm, you’ll be wondering where I’m taking you.”

Juan didn’t reply, her lips simply quivered. She had no strength left to speak and none to even look at Mrs. Cloud. Her eyes were fluttering shut.

“Hey nonono,” Mrs. Cloud muttered, slapping Juan across the face lightly but enough to open her eyes. “You can’t go to sleep on me, I can’t be sure you’ll wake up from that, you’re already bad as it is, you won’t be able to distinguish sleep from death.”

Juan once again didn’t utter a word but tears formed in her eyes. Slowly they fell out and rolled down to the floor, seeping into the ground like her blood had.

“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Cloud muttered.

To which most heads swiveled around to hear. They had never heard her apologize as a whole and have never seen the situation that came after a supposed, ‘apologizing’ CEO sighting. But this… this seemed to be genuine, like she actually cared and to look after Juan, like she was actually deeply hurt by the way Juan turned out.

“It’s all my fault,” Mrs. Cloud sighed, “I really brought down hell on you, didn’t I?”

Juan was astonished and so what the secretary. This moment, this was the moment they had been waiting to see/ hear for the longest time, a long-held satisfaction of their’s being helped by Mrs. Cloud like that.

Mrs. Cloud stood up from her squat and looked down at Juan. “I should have told you in advance about them shouldn’t I?” she muttered, deeply in thought, “If I had told you about the guns and watchdog then would you have had a good turn? Maybe if given the full chance to leave, you would have found your way out since you would/should have found a way to maneuver past them, right?”

Mrs. Cloud looked back at Juan after her eyes traveled away during her thinking. “I should have done that right? Mentioned how the neighbors aren’t really that friendly with trespassers and that I just recently employed a watchguard that kept a lookout in case some of you tried to leave in the nighttime,” she shrugged playfully, “I wanted to make sure that even if they got past the electrically charged wall and the iron wall, that they will not make it past the fences that keep them locked into this place.”

She patted Juan’s hair sadly, “I didn’t mean to toss you into the mess you know, I really wanted to see you try your hardest. Scramble around with lawyers and force yourself to go to law school to learn a few words to use against me in court. I really wanted to see you make your greatest stab at my company and watch the expression on your face when you fail.”

She took a stretch, stretching her legs and her arms. “Sadly, you got roped into it too,” she muttered regretfully, “maybe you’re not that much of a good listener after all.. You might have been able to predict the movements of the watcher and get past him. The shooting was inevitable though… You were bound to end up like this again, back to the beginning, with a bunch of holes through your body. I guess it was your fault that you ran that way.”

Mrs. Cloud turned to Juan again. “Then… it seems like this isn’t my fault at all, haha. Maybe not the warning part… a warning would have good from me but the rest of what happened were your foolish mistakes. You’re paying for them right now.”

Mrs. Cloud turned around and began walking back to the car. “It looked like there’s a chance you will be admitted back into the asylum afterall, I’m not heartless and you did complete my request to come back on the verge of death. But, your chances of living will only come down to your luck in the end.”

Mrs. Cloud walked past her secretary, patting her on the shoulder. “Let’s keep going, shall we? First up was that Dove entertainment right? We can’t afford to be late.”

The secretary shuddered, following Mrs. Cloud closely behind her as she re-entered the back-seats of the car and quietly entered the passenger. “Are we not going to the hospital immediately, ma’am? Or the emergency room in the asylum.”

Mrs. Cloud’s eyebrow rose up, looking almost offended. “And risk being late for the meetings today?” Mrs. Cloud chuckled, her smile soon whipping off her face. “We’ll attend to her when we come back. Let’s hope her luck can hold out till then.”